Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Nimrod has amazing performance, extremely clear syntax, and advanced metaprogramming features. That combination is unmatched in programming languages. It is a significant advance.

Yet, the Wikipedia editors continuously delete the Nimrod programming language article, claiming Nimrod is "not notable".

Wikipedia editors will say that there aren't enough third party articles or something, but that isn't true. And then they will say, yes, this is notable compared to quite a lot of other garbage or trivia that has articles on Wikipedia, but just because "other crap exists" isn't an excuse to allow this article.

I think that notability has to be a relative concept, and Nimrod is notable. At this point its just small-dick Wikipedia editors asserting their control. Either that or some editors are invested in other programming languages and are trying to stop this one from becoming mainstream.

This proves to me that Wikipedia is utter crap. But unfortunately, we are stuck with Wikipedia and it has quite a lot of influence. I wish someone who had pull on Wikipedia or knew how to make it work would fix this problem. I have tried. It seems like maybe it actually just made the editors band together more to try to continue to keep it off, just as sort of a reaction. Like its a group that works together to oppose anyone who isn't already an insider.

I don't think there'd be an objection to creating a cited article. I took a brief look at the deleted version, and it didn't have any sources considered sufficient. It cited two things: 1) a random blog post by someone who tried Nimrod and liked it; and 2) an introductory Dr. Dobbs article written by the Nimrod author himself. Now #2 is useful as a supplemental source, but typically can't be the only source for a Wikipedia article. Had I run across it, I personally would've just tagged it "needs third-party references" rather than deleting, but which way things on the borderline go has a lot of variance.

A better place to start would probably be to find a description of Nimrod in some standard source—textbook, survey article, etc., and start from there, then flesh out with supplemental sources written by the Nimrod author himself for details. If Nimrod hasn't yet gotten solid third-party coverage despite deserving it, the root of the problem might lie elsewhere than Wikipedia—on scientific/technical/etc. topics, Wikipedia just summarizes the current state of the literature, leaving improving the literature as a job better done elsewhere.

It has been deleted many times. There are plenty of references including the one to the Dr. Dobb's article, which is what comes up at the top of a Google search.

The fact that you looked into this and your actions (none) are siding with the other Wikipedia editors proves my point. You personally would have tagged it "needs third-party references"? Put your money where your mouth is, undelete it, and add that tag. Or prove my point. You actually do nothing, which is the same as standing behind the other Wikipedia editors. Like a little small-dick Mafia.

I have nothing but despise for Wikipedia editors.

Ah, I see I overestimated your interest in good-faith discussion vs. just flinging insults.

Have you taken a look at this draft? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Nimrod_%28programming_la....

I find it unfair that "other crap" does indeed exist. There is plenty of programming languages which are more obscure with far less references and they have not been removed. Even looking at the D programming language article I am left wondering which reference makes it notable? They all seem to be written by Walter, or by Andrei or linking to some random D projects.

I have no energy to deal with people like Czarkoff on Wikipedia, who clearly have no idea what they are talking about. They should clearly think over their guideline keepers, if declining a perfectly notable programming language like Nimrod for Wikipedia makes more sense then keeping it.

From a fellow language designer: Nimrod is very notable, combining previously unthought language features like efficient compilation and macros (only Elixir can compete here) and a real-time GC, with a python-like syntax with types.

But not only that. It is also practical.

The question isn't whether Nimrod is good or interesting, but whether it's covered in third-party literature that can be cited. If you flesh out this comment into an article giving an overview of Nimrod and its notable features, and publish the article in either a trade magazine or an academic conference/journal, then that would certainly be helpful.

That mostly just follows from Wikipedia's ambition to be a tertiary source. Unlike a collaborative knowledge-production wiki such as c2.com, where editors are supposed to develop their own judgments and original analyses of topics, Wikipedia is just supposed to summarize the secondary literature, with citations. So the presence of decent secondary literature to summarize is the main prerequisite for an article. I don't think that's the only good way to run a wiki, which is why Wikipedia is not the only wiki I contribute to. If someone starts a wiki to be a comprehensive programming-language history & reference, I'd contribute. But I think having a tertiary-source wiki that only cites information to solid secondary sources is one useful kind of wiki to have.

It's interesting that outside of HN (and maybe Reddit), Wikipedia mainly gets the exact opposite kind of criticism: lots of people complain that it's far too loose in its citation standards.

There have been numerous articles published about Nimrod.

Its very obvious that this has become a case of Wikipedia editors ganging up.

Some of the articles that reference Nimrod are on Wikipedia.

> find a description of Nimrod in some standard source—textbook, survey article, etc.

No offense, but are you even aware what you're saying? You just limited Wikipedia to describe only those new languages which come from academia and have research on them published. Plenty of those, to be sure, but this shouldn't be a requirement for a language to be described, IMO. Oh, and it's apparently not, the second try (after PureScript, which is absent from wiki) brought me to this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_%28programming_language%29 which cites oh so many serious papers. I could probably easily find tens of articles like this on wiki - either delete them right now or stop the double standards treatment of any one particular language. Like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picolisp - and I really could go on (EDIT: there is a paper on Picolisp, but it's in the external links section which made me miss it).

The third-party sources don't specifically need to come from academia or be research articles. Third-party sources can perfectly well be (and often are) practice-oriented and come from industry: books from trade presses, articles in tech magazines, etc. Tons of languages on Wikipedia with well-sourced articles aren't from academia: CoffeeScript, Go, Clojure, TypeScript, Dart, Arc, D, Erlang, Swift, Scala, etc.

Can you explain what sources make the D programming language article notable?

Wait, wait. Look at Arc article. It cites no printed ("textbooks, survey articles, etc") materials at all. All the references in the article are either essays by the author, blog posts or github repos. Which makes it pretty much in the same situation as Nimrod. How come Arc has its page, and Nimrod doesn't?

Other than that, all the languages you mentioned are either old (5+ years) or have corporate backing, or both - and it should be obvious that we're not talking about langs like these. Aside from Arc you failed to mention even one language comparable to Nimrod in terms of existing sources.

Meanwhile, look at newLisp article and its references. Why does it exist? It has four referenced sources, where one is "unreliable", one is an article comparable to the one in Dr.Dobbs on Nimrod and two remaining ones are posts by the author.

Look at Felix article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_%28programming_language%2...). It has no source whatsoever, yet it still exists.

Same with Alice ML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_%28programming_language%2...) - which is probably just laziness of editors, because Alice papers were published IIRC. Yet they are not referenced at all, and the article still exists.

There is reference to one printed source in Io language article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_%28programming_language%29), so maybe it should be allowed to live. However, "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" is not a very detailed description of any one language it covers (of course) and I could argue it's not enough to rely on it as an only source.

Lisp flavored Erlang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFE_%28programming_language%29) is apparently well sourced, as the article for it exists. Not even one of the sources was ever published in print.

Same with Hy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hy) - all sources are blog posts and similar.

Look, I could really go on. Studying obscure languages nobody heard about is my hobby and I have lots and lots of examples, but I'd hope the above is enough to show you a "double standard" displayed here by Wikipedia editors. Either remove all of those - and no, I'm not going to help you with this - or stop bullying some languages without any reason at all.

>This proves to me that Wikipedia is utter crap.

The most it proves only that Wikipedia does not include some items that it should include. It says nothing about the quality of the articles that are included.

The editors don't get it:

Not only does crap exist, but it is actively protected from deletion by editors. For example this nice little notable content farm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpedia

You can probably get it to "stay" as long as you provide 3 references from websites to it, basically. GL!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com