Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
obscure (adjective)
not known to many people:
- an obscure island in the Pacific
- an obscure 12th-century mystic
Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.
obscure (adjective)
not clear and difficult to understand or see:
- Official policy has changed, for reasons that remain obscure.
- His answers were obscure and confusing.
- "the syntax itself is obscure"
Needless to say: production use ≠ notability, for very good reason.
For example, Go got famous because of how much they pushed channels and launching thousands of green threads per app as the next big thing.
Over time, people kind of soured on these ideas, but Go was a great, simple language with good DX that built static executables.
As a contrast, languages like Kotlin or Swift also brought huge DX improvements to their respective audiences, but didn't really have any standout (novel or divisive) features that made people talk about them.
Odin's like that - it's basically C (or more accurately Pascal) with better generics and some gamedev related features, so it's not as painful to write as plain C.
If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.
Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai.
This is a popular joke because of the release timeline. The reality is the inverse, and Ginger Bill has acknowledged the influence of Jai.
The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.
> Many people think Odin is "just for games" at the moment, but that tells you more about the people who say that than Odin itself. This is especially true when gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible.
> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
^ I was only addressing this comment, not the specifics of Odin.
> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
I would argue that being capable of doing anything is not in conflict with being oriented around something specific. Any Turing complete language is capable of those things.
Again, I don't even know Odin, so I'm not addressing whether or not it is game dev oriented. Only that the arguments themselves don't seem sound.
EDIT: grammar/formatting
I think the influence ended up going both ways eventually though.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai
which simply isn't true. Just google it, e.g.,
https://handmade.network/forums/t/1338-the_odin_programming_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jai/comments/1j2idvz/is_odin_kind_o...
Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.
The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).
In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.
> maybe I just happened to miss it?
You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.
(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)
There are probably thousands of JavaScript packages on NPM that are more well-known than Odin, that doesn't mean they deserve their own Wikipedia page.
Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations. A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent.
The Notability of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.
One of the qualifications is having third-party sources document the subject, where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area). A company’s statement that it uses a programming language might be factual, but that doesn’t necessarily make it notable.
(To be clear: I was only vaguely aware of Odin, and I have no idea who/what JangaFX. But that isn’t dispositive.)
>where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area)
this is where the bias kicks in. It would be great if Wikipedia's notability goes "All youtube sources are not reliable" but instead its always phrased like "Some Youtube sources are not reliable" and what qualifies as this "some" is usually decided by the personal bias of the admins.
You can read the policy yourself[1]. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me at all.
I only mentioned the YouTube scenario, but that's pretty much the case for almost everything. I'll repeat it again: it all boils down to the personal bias of the admins, and you seem to agree with that as well.