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Comment by recursivecaveat | Hacker News Reader

I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Like most nerd/geek things their footprint skews toward the internet, and people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.

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This is an argument for deleting those non-notable articles as well, not retaining other non-notable articles.

SISC is there because it's not notable, so the busybodies haven't even noticed the page exists. Odin, however, is notable, and that put it on their radar as a target for attacking its notability.

And here's the persecution LARPing the article talks about.

So why is that article not deleted yet?

I see it's been nominated for deletion today. Looking at it, it's been marked for attention for two years, so it's not as if people haven't had time to do anything about it.

Unfortunately what makes a programming language famous is usually not the thing that makes it useful.

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.

Not more obscure than Brainfuck.

What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and its provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.

And it’s also a reinvention of Corrado Bohm’s P’’ which is even more seminal

Could you use it in production?

From Cambridge dictionary:

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.

If you quote the dictionary to win an argument, quote it in full. There are two definitions of obscure in the Cambridge dictionary. The other is:

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"

Pretty sure caveat intended for the former definition.

I could use (and have used) Körber/HighJump Advantage Architect in production, and yet that's nonetheless so far from notable that Körber's own Wikipedia page doesn't even bother to mention its acquisition of HighJump and the software products thereof, let alone the proprietary graphical programming language which HighJump's customers use to configure and customize their flagship warehouse management system.

Needless to say: production use ≠ notability, for very good reason.

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