I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.
This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.
There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)
If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.
"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...
If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.
> I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.
I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible, making fire/smoke simulations a hell of a lot better and faster by running it all on the GPU. I upgraded to a $10K GPU more or less so I could do bigger scenes faster in EmberGen.
Only once I was inside the JangaFX/EmberGen community did I find out about Odin, which is the base of their entire product line, something like 4-5 products by now. Generally I don't care much about Algol/C-like languages like Odin and the rest, but because it's used in EmberGen and lots (all?) of JangaFX products, I've ended up using it a lot for better or worse.
> If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".
> If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".
Please RTFA and address the rebukes to this very point that are presented herein... -.- "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable, but how to establish this fact is the problem; a tweet by the CEO is not enough to establish this, secondary reporting by a reliable and archived source would.
> "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable
I'm not even sure that would count, really. A world-class product that gets a lot of coverage is notable, for sure, but that wouldn't be enough to make some implementation detail of that product notable unless the sources really leaned on it.
So Odin is a proprietary language used by a startup company that makes graphical effect tools, one of which is popular with vfx artists? I can see why Wikipedia's washing its hands of it.
> If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable"
Notability is not transitive. If you make a notable thing using a non-notable thing, it doesn't make the non-notable thing notable unless somehow the notable thing sparks a wave of public interest and thus reporting on the non-notable thing.
Also EmberGen doesn't seem terribly notable either.
How many SIGGRAPH papers go in-depth into EmberGen? As far as I can tell: zero. A Google Scholar search shows a single paper where EmberGen is not just a passing mention, and it's in a journal with low reach: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22e... -- also somewhat damning in its conclusion that EmberGen is faster than Blender, but if you need "precise artistic control", keep using Blender.
Has EmberGen won the Academy Scientific and Technical award, like, say, Houdini, Renderman, After Effects or Dragonframe? No it hasn't.
Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on Houdini's HScript.
What do you mean by “proprietary language”? To me “proprietary” means closed source, where one can only download binaries, not source code. “proprietary” can also have source code available, but with a license which is not open-source.
Odin, however, is an open-source language with an open-source license:
I knew nothing about this language, despite being a programmer, until today. My takeaway from TFA was this language's claim to relevance is the fact that it's used to produce a product, and the CEO of the company producing the product was trying to vouch for it.
Having looked more, this is not right. It seems more like one person who wanted to make video games developed a programming language instead, and now makes their living developing this programming language. And has built up some community of users, and one of those users is a small company making VFX software which has some usage but it's not making headlines anywhere. But this is so significant to the language author that they have a huge section of the front page of their own language's website mentioning this commercial software, even though they're... not?... affiliated with the company? Bigging up the reflected glory.
And in the years of this programming language existing, and supposedly being being general purpose... there have been zero papers about it in the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems or The Computer Journal, nor computer interest publications like Ars Technica or Linux Journal, and it hasn't been covered at SIGGRAPH or the Game Developers Conference. Why not?
If the language wants a Wikipedia page, the way forward is to get notable coverage from reliable sources. You and your friends who hang out on Discord and blog or vlog/livestream aren't reliable sources, even if you have a million friends.
There aren't specialised notability guidelines for programming languages, but there are for software, which a programming language definitely is. Even if no academics or professional journalists have written about it, there are other ways to establish its notability:
- have schools and universities used it to teach programming? There are hundreds, possibly thousands of languages that clear that bar
- have books or manuals been written about it? From what I can see, there is exactly one book about it
This language could clear the notability bar, but it just currently doesn't. The language's author positing a conspiracy of Wikipedia moderators keeping it out is unhelpful. I wouldn't include it in Wikipedia with its current sources, and I've literally never heard of it until today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
I agree with you about the notability aspects, but using the word “proprietary” has a very specific meaning and Odin may be many things, but it’s not “proprietary”—it’s open source. When I saw you use the word “proprietary”, I was initially under the impression that Odin’s source code wasn’t even available, and one could only download .exe files and binary packages of Odin.
In the Wikipedia sense these two are much more notable than the Odin language, because universities and academic publications have given them publicised attention.
As I understand it, the Wikipedia model is that anyone may contribute, but the information has to be collected from sources that conform to certain formal criteria. There are no such sources for Odin.
If building products were enough, I know a whole lots of stuff I built with friends that used in several trillion dollar companies, likely generating a small part of considerable revenue we aren't running around trying to get it on Wikipedia pages...
I don't see the point about why making a closed tool open source suddenly give it enough notoriety to put it on Wikipedia.
I say that as someone who has used Odin, I do decently like the language but it's just moot to try to fight over this randomly.
There is a fair question here (though presented with questionable integrity) about what notability means in programming languages. Especially for more recent and perhaps not widely used programming languages.
I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of).
Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality.
On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.
I've heard of Odin for years now. Maybe because I like knowing about new/nascent languages. For example, have you heard of roc-lang? You've likely heard of Zig.
It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble.
Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them.
Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug
It is an encyclopedia of topics that meet its standards of notability (ie there exists "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"[1]).
> Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts.
Odin is pretty notable imo, but what I had for lunch yesterday is a fact and it does not belong in Wikipedia. A house is a shelter for people, thus my house is a shelter for people; you are a person, but that doesn't that you belong in my house.
This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.
There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)
If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.
"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...
If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.