Interesting article (I tend to agree with you re SNG in the programming field). But unfortunately I couldn't easily absorb the substance as your site needs some work on mobile:
- text completely overflowing the background
- body text is arguably too small
- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually
This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
The author protested the framing, but it's very much a game-dev oriented language. In fact, it's the most pleasant language for game development I have ever used. It comes with all sorts of "batteries included" in that direction, possibly more than any other existing language. (Well, I still didn't get my Jai invite, so who knows ;) Odin was a major influence on Jai.)
Yeah oriented might be the wrong word here. "Surprisngly well suited for the job" is more like it. It was very ergonomic. In fact, I ended up translating my Odin game to several other languages and the experience was quite painful. (That's one way to measure the quality of a language! How much it hurts to port code out of it.)
Ginger Bill directly addresses this erroneous argument in TFA:
> 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.
> The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.
^ 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.
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, people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.
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.
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.
What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and it's provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.
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.
It's kind of niche but is getting bigger. The Discord server has 10k members, the biggest(?) Twitch programming streamer has been using it recently, JangaFX is big enough to be used by AAA game companies and a few large film studios, and I'm sure there's plenty of users who aren't on the Discord server.
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.
They already have hundreds of programming language articles, this being singled out is a perfect encapsulation of the sheer lowIQ stupidity of the Wikipedia community and their process.
Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.
I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V).
(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.)
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D then you have heard of Odin.
No it's an indication that notoriety in Discord servers isn't a basis for relevance in an encyclopedia. Which is a good choice. A streamer mentioned a language? Wikipedia isn't Twitter.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages, not "the attention of social media" -- that's a silly shallow bad faith reduction.
> I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages
Are you though? Like this seems like hobby project that hasn't really generated much discussion or interest in the broader programming language community, and practically speaking doesn't seem to have seen much use as a systems programming language (a single vfx package isn't really that impressive).
People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest, and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Yes ... read the other comments and TFA that you have completely ignored. And I wouldn't have said that I was talking about that if I weren't talking about that.
> People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest
Nonsense.
> and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Why wouldn't you want to have an article about a programming language that is currently used in production by someone? Are there any downsides to this?
what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias rely on secondary and not primary sources because they must be authoritative. The CEO of Kelloggs doesn't get to write the wikipedia article for kelloggs even if millions of people eat his cornflakes.
If a programming language is widely used in production then sourcing an article with secondary sources ought to be trivial. But the appropriate content for primary information and original research for a language.. is the language's website.
But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it? It's quite broad with Wikipedia but still...
The language clearly exists, it's not a student project, it's is use, people are interested in it. So the page was created, but is now removed because of formalities (the lack of good enough sources).
> But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it?
Yes, but that implies filtering on all things that are false. And in this day and age, filtering truth is a very hard thing to do, so instead they set the bar a little higher at “a reputable source checked that it is indeed true”.
If they didn't, it would soon be filled by tons of made up things fabricated for marketing reasons.
please stop crying about bad faith every time someone disagrees with you. If you think everyone talks with you in bad faith maybe you didn't articulate your points very well.
What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work. The Encyclopedia Britannica which comes in at a frugal 120k entries doesn't add new ones because you yell at the manager long enough, they choose what to add.
Encyclopedias are not consumer or user driven but curator driven. It's not want or popularity that determines inclusion, it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance. It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes. I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.
> What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work.
Changing the subject is yet more bad faith ... what I called bad faith wasn't anything about how encyclopedias work, it was about an evasive rhetorical move.
> it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance
That's quite an admission and contradicts other claims on this page that WP's notability guidelines are objective. And neither quality standards nor relevance are the same as notability -- it's almost as if this person has no idea what he's talking about and is simply doing apologetics for a position that he's planted his flag on.
> It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes.
Silly bad faith strawman.
> I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.
Exactly. Because a person hangs out in certain social media circles or bubbles, doesn't mean that information from those places are general public knowledge or meets the standards that Wikipedia asks for.
Of course it's not general public knowledge ... that's why we put information in encyclopedias and other sources of information. People run across a mention of Odin and want to know about it.
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.
You make it sound like you're confusing popularity with notability.
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.
Notability is a qualified state on Wikipedia, as both TFA and Wikipedia itself document.
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.)
To be clear, I was not talking about Odin specifically. This is about notability in general.
>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.
> 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.
It does not seem unreasonable to me as well and I do not recall stating that being the case.
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.
I don’t agree, because no evidence of bias has been advanced. They might be biased, but the plain reading of the situation of that (1) Odin is not notable under GNG, (2) JangaFX might be notable, but notability isn’t transitive.
You never hearing about Odin, is an example of why its article was rejected by Wikipedia, because they failed at providing reputable references. The languages that you likely know of, often are corporate backed, with large marketing budgets and backdoor deals to help saturate traditional and social media.
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.
> I've never heard of it before [...] but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.
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.
Don't know why you get downvoted, but this is how AI-based projects
win over time: they don't randomly decide to delete valuable data.
Grokipedia might be trash in terms of its quality, but at least it
it doesn't have omnipresent moral busybodies loitering in to "purify" it from knowledge.
Ok, suppose you have a "trash/low quality" article and
"this article has been deleted", the article with some info
will win over the audience as they search for it. Like "Worse is Better", the quality
will improve over time and the "deleted article" will stay at 0 recognition.
An average internet user will not complain about the Wikipedia
article, they just switch to Grokipedia and whatever AI-generated content it has,
since they now have it.
If I've got this right: programming these days -- especially niche areas -- meshes poorly with Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources and notability, which were designed mostly with traditional media in mind.
e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.
The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.
As an actual esolang enthusiast, I can say that Malbolge is only notable because it remained unsolved for the extended period only due to the lack of serious attempts. It doesn't even pass the meme criteria IMO.
Oh, sure, the "In Popular Culture" section is a prerequisite for every Wikipedia article. ;-)
In seriousness though, the Malbolge article (2003) significantly predates the TV series in question (2012--2019). I wouldn't be surprised that writers got the info from Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them
No. It's more like, there are plenty of programming-related articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL. But the reality is, if you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.
This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.
Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.
This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
>Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
Actually there are organizations -- several of which brag about it openly -- that employ people to carefully manage what ends up on Wikipedia, and which side of a story ends up in popular articles.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
There has to be a better way to do this at that scale than just "oh we forgot to notice it and now its too awkward to remove it"? Maybe i am missing something idk
> Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
> More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
Do you have proof there are more editors now? By an order of magnitude? Or don’t mean there are people who like to participate in Wikipedia drama and who don’t actively contribute to article creation?
> The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work.
That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work this articles have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.
> I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors
I'm fairly sure I've seen statistics that say the opposite of that (citation needed), so I'd like to see that study.
Generally speaking, encyclopedias are tertiary sources, so that makes sense (though the line between secondary and tertiary sources is sometimes blurry)... but as you say, there are plenty of topics (a niche programming language under active development primarily by one guy is a good example) where the topic might be notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article but not widely discussed enough to have a good source other than the primary developer. I understand that "well the guy who made it said it" sounds like an obvious argument, but I also understand that Wikipedia is trying to maintain their role as an encyclopedia first and foremost. I'm not sure what the optimal path is.
Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.
And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.
> Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments
>
> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.
important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.
Everything is decided by favors. If I list something and you delete it I will support you the next time. Non of the guidelines are really relevant to any process. If my team says a source is or isn't reliable you just have to accept it however absurd or bizarre it is. Suck it up.
Programming articles exist because no one bothered to delete them. I've actually joked about it a decade ago.
I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way. That way they will collectively oppose everything i do. The game grows increasingly absurd as the true colors shine though. I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
Behind my back they write walls of text how to get rid of me. (I wrote some tools to dig into article and user edit history)
But all I do is contribute citations with quality sources, sure I do it in places they don't want to see developed but the decision to have an article was already made, only the real work remains.
The easiest are the articles listed under the fringe category. They are all in terrible shape, sources are easy to find and it instantly enrages the fringe warriors.
Note: You don't actually have to believe something is real to be able to cite a source.
Jimbo is such a fan of tag team editing it can hardly be considered a mistake.
If the wiki followed its own rules and guidelines you could write a guideline for the notability of articles in the programming category.
If you do that now the guideline guardians will tell you with a straight face that no amount of GitHub stars is enough and that no such guideline is needed.
If you provide example articles they will be deleted to prove the point.
One could probably train an interesting llm on deleted wp contributions. There might be more content there than in main space.
You've openly stated that you were intentionally acting in bad faith, hounding other editors to provoke them and doing so while logged out to evade scrutiny. Retreating to "you can't prove I did anything wrong" is not the defense you think it is.
Assuming good faith is not a suicide pact. If you consistently aim to disrupt the project then you obviously should be CBANed. I can't comment on the evidence available in your block discussion, only what you've presented here.
I have no block discussion. I just read other peoples talk pages.
Besides from the obvious cases it is quite subjective what disrupting the project even means.
I'm not trying to stop the character assassination article but I will be a nuance to the process. I will argue this valuable to the project.
Im kinda curious, if a topic is considered a fringe theory, say fringe physics (where the consensus among surviving editors is that it must be denounced as fake until published in a high quality journal) would you oppose including other high quality sources or would you exclude then to help portray the topic as fake?
If one was to reliably demonstrate 1) there to be [say] a giant time travel laboratory, 2) a hundred million research budget and 3) prominent names involved.
I will not concede that it is at all "subjective" what being disruptive means in the specific case of your intentionally bad-faith trolling. You may choose to categorise that either as an obvious case or refer to my previous comments.
You describe the concept of being taken seriously. We use this a lot in real life. It's arguably a very useful concept.
Wikipedia has elaborate guidelines for everything but users have their own ideas.
For example, the guidelines don't grant you the privilege to delete contributions because you've decided not to take the editor seriously.
Imagine reverting and putting it in an edit summary: I don't take this guy seriously
If there are insufficient independent so called reliable sources to establish the so called notability of Odin but it does have 11k GitHub stars. Then you put an infobox on the article that describes the problem.
You then attempt to find sources. If you find nothing that Wikipedia accepts you might have a conversation about sources for programming languages.
Then you end up reading things like the AFD for hackernoon (22 May 2026) Not even worthy of a stub?
Then you wonder how any programming article established so called notability.
I've just looked at php and I don't see any reference from mainstream media, definitely nothing specifically about php.
What kind of happens is that there are some people who invest their lives in Wikipedia, their opinions is what ends up mattering.
This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.
The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.
Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.
So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)
Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.
Sounds like you are describing Grokipedia (Grok), where the general public has rejected it as a replacement for Wikipedia. Way too much hallucinating, tainted algorithms reflecting political preferences, gossip, and unverified or disreputable sources.
And as an example of bias: I personally witnessed a wikipedia editors adding their own interpretation of a certain written article. This interpretation was very politically biased and not justified by the text, but these were influential wikipedia editors so that it stayed in. I then asked the author of the article on Twitter if this interpretation was correct. I was unambiguously told NO. This information (including the public twitter conversation), was rejected by the wikipedia editors because it was first hand accounts.
Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.
Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.
I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.
It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.
This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.
Yeah, that reference section (odin-lang.org, jangafx.com, learnodin.org, c3-lang.org, odinbook.com, gingerbill.org) is probably not up to Wikipedia's standards...
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can participate. Anyone can advocate for change, such as changing the rules around notability.
But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.
I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.
So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.
And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.
Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
I looked and the cultural marxism tweet has zero likes, zero comments, and only 35 views. Although it has caused much consternation for you and the author. So it seems strange that you don't understand why people might be concerned about what Wikipedia has to say about things, and how it works, given its prominence.
Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge.
It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.
Misrepresenting what another contributor said? yeah you can be blocked.
Disagreeing on what should be in an article? That won't get you blocked. Getting into an edit war about it might. Being "right" is not a valid defense for edit warring.
In general, its not the place for admins to decide what is "true". Its their job to make sure people are behaving in accordance to the rules.
Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.
But other than that?
Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!
can only speak from my personal experience, I have made a scratchpad app within Odin and it was the first language that I picked for because I wanted C-esque speed and gui libraries being built in and I even used LLM's to write the whole thing to see LLM's capabilities.
After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!
I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.
I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least
I don't think anyone doubts that odin is a real programming language that you can make something in. The part that is doubtful is that it enjoys any level of popularity.
Popularity is a bit subjective though as popularity also determines on all the projects built in that said language. Zig got a lot more popular because of the projects that have/had been built on it (Tigerbeetle/Bun) which signaled production-esque use of Zig.
I do understand what you are saying though and I don't think that I have a meaningful thing to add in that and Odin is relatively popular within some circles but the question seems to be if its popular (enough*)
The most dumbfounding thing in all of this is the number of people interacting directly with Jimmy Wales on twitter and having no sense for how wikipedia works or why. It should not be surprising that a company webpage or even the CEO confirming the fact are insufficient sources. If wikipedia did accept this, they would just be a place for people to make self-reported baseless claims. There's already a place for that, and it's the platform they're responding on.
Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.
Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.
I dunno I just find it silly because they're making such a Thing out of it that soon there's just gonna be a Wikipedia page on Odingate as it is rapidly becoming a notable public event of its own. Then that page will have to link to a page on Odin anyway
The hypothetical "Odingate" article in a reliable source would probably have to discuss Odin enough to also be a viable source for Odin itself; problem solved.
If the language is too irrelevant to be of interest then why would any bickering about it be notable? There must be thousands of topics people whine about for not making the notability threshold.
Well Jimmy Wales is a kinda notable dude to be bickering directly about it with other internet-famous public figures.
Second, any serious observer of the programming languages would conclude that Odin is in the top 2-3 contenders for the long-term replacement of C. Even if it never attains the goal of supplanting C, I'd argue its historical importance (within its field) is already on par with Betamax or HD-DVD (adjusted for time inflation).
Finally the field of programmers who are able to work on programming languages they made as their full-time profession is extremely rarified, maybe 10-20 individuals at any given time. It is the ultimate measure of having made it -- what we all dream of. At that point you're practically royalty to programmers, and many will know you by name. That is the level of fame (for there is no other accurate word of it) that gingerbill has attained in this community. This dude is a hall-of-famer. Already. Without a single story written about him in a newspaper!
FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.
> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
This type of odd vitriol against vlang, when the language has nothing to do with Wikipedia's processes, is both misplaced and demonstrates succumbing to excessive fanaticism from competitor propaganda. The origins of this strange sentiment, appears to partially come from Odin's creator, making the situation a bit of poetic justice. We are here to witness vlang's creator having a Wikipedia page, while Odin's creator still doesn't, and despite his language being older.
Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.
Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.
While perhaps this is on me for not stating my position while repeating Bill's comment, I think you are unfairly assuming bad faith.
You are wrong to state that I am motivated by fanatism or jealousy.
I have no involvement whatever with Odin and am in agreement with the parent article (though I think it's personal criticisms veer a bit too far). The creator of Odin using Odin at jangafx is not an appropriate source in my view.
Nowhere, that I could find, was katamari's post about Wikipedia's rejection of Odin or the one by Ginger Bill (which katamari references), were either was saying that vlang was fraudulent (which is ridiculous).
Rather, the shooting of such strays appears to reflect old competitor propaganda pushed on certain social media sites (that traces back to Ginger Bill in different ways) and a sentiment, often regurgitated by certain fanatics of his, where they appear to be upset by vlang's level of success.
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language
Even here, where this quote is taken directly from Ginger Bill's post, shows how wrong he and certain of his followers are. It is not about about Wikipedia mods not liking Odin. Wikipedia has certain rules and reference requirements for articles to survive an AfC or AfD "challenge" and Odin failed.
The real "engagement farming" is from the Wikipedia editor attempting to delete the article for clout amongst the Wikipedia community. That's all this is about.
Why would deleting a page on an obscure topic earn anyone clout? Did they see into the future to know the public tantrum would follow?
People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.
I'm not sure I understand why even a truly obscure programming language article should ever be deleted; it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper. If Odin ceased all development tomorrow it would be good to have some record of what it was.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete. Wikipedia does not want to just trust the developers of $ObscureLang to maintain their own wikipedia page. So, the existence of the $ObscureLang page (and, in the aggregate, many similar pages) imposes a maintenance burden on Wikipedia. Better to say nothing than to risk saying something inaccurate.
Interesting article until you reach the gooey, messy bottom where the author makes a sudden turn and decides to pick apart the "spineless" creator of the programming language (who is the article's actual subject) by using their own ideologically and morally superior perspectives as truth. Smug and ironic.
I'd say it provides a lot of information about whole situation, including context on how wikipedia operates and history of behavior from the creator of the language.
Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?
I know programming is what's most important to many in this community, but as an outsider I need to ask: literally WTF is Odin? I mean I know about Java and C++, etc. But Odin? That's what Wikipedia policies are for. It cannot include anything and everything about every single profession, subculture, or interest group.
An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?
That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
> Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur
Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.
> An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article.
Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
I'm so happy I have something I can link to that clearly and patiently engages with all the people who concern troll about Wikipedia. It genuinely bothers me how the temperature of the conversation about wikipedia (even here on HN) has changed so much because of people who don't know anything, don't care to verify anything, but have an axe to grind.
I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.
If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.
But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.
I've found myself running into this sort of trap a lot. When I do something I think about the data that will be created and how to preserve it, and sometimes this prevents me from ever doing the thing, while the reality is that any data generated is worthless anyway.
For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] thread- text completely overflowing the background
- body text is arguably too small
- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually
- footnotes appearing out of order
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
> 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
> Odin was a major influence on Jai
which simply isn't true. Just google it, e.g.,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jai/comments/1j2idvz/is_odin_kind_o...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317815
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages
They already have hundreds of programming language articles, this being singled out is a perfect encapsulation of the sheer lowIQ stupidity of the Wikipedia community and their process.
(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.)
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D then you have heard of Odin.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
Are you though? Like this seems like hobby project that hasn't really generated much discussion or interest in the broader programming language community, and practically speaking doesn't seem to have seen much use as a systems programming language (a single vfx package isn't really that impressive).
People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest, and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Yes ... read the other comments and TFA that you have completely ignored. And I wouldn't have said that I was talking about that if I weren't talking about that.
> People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest
Nonsense.
> and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Nonsense.
The bad faith here is tiresome.
If a programming language is widely used in production then sourcing an article with secondary sources ought to be trivial. But the appropriate content for primary information and original research for a language.. is the language's website.
Yes, but that implies filtering on all things that are false. And in this day and age, filtering truth is a very hard thing to do, so instead they set the bar a little higher at “a reputable source checked that it is indeed true”.
If they didn't, it would soon be filled by tons of made up things fabricated for marketing reasons.
> As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
...
> what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia.
What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work. The Encyclopedia Britannica which comes in at a frugal 120k entries doesn't add new ones because you yell at the manager long enough, they choose what to add.
Encyclopedias are not consumer or user driven but curator driven. It's not want or popularity that determines inclusion, it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance. It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes. I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.
> What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work.
Changing the subject is yet more bad faith ... what I called bad faith wasn't anything about how encyclopedias work, it was about an evasive rhetorical move.
> it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance
That's quite an admission and contradicts other claims on this page that WP's notability guidelines are objective. And neither quality standards nor relevance are the same as notability -- it's almost as if this person has no idea what he's talking about and is simply doing apologetics for a position that he's planted his flag on.
> It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes.
Silly bad faith strawman.
> I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.
Bad faith smug virtue signaling.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Video_links
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.
Well... It's a systems programming language.
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.
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.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language
e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.
The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.
In seriousness though, the Malbolge article (2003) significantly predates the TV series in question (2012--2019). I wouldn't be surprised that writers got the info from Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them
No. It's more like, there are plenty of programming-related articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL. But the reality is, if you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.
This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.
Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.
This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
Actually there are organizations -- several of which brag about it openly -- that employ people to carefully manage what ends up on Wikipedia, and which side of a story ends up in popular articles.
There has to be a better way to do this at that scale than just "oh we forgot to notice it and now its too awkward to remove it"? Maybe i am missing something idk
More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
> Maybe i am missing something
You are.
> idk
That says it all.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
What has mostly changed is that there are more editors now, and thus more eyes and also more serious discussion (rigor?) about such things.
That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work this articles have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.
I'm fairly sure I've seen statistics that say the opposite of that (citation needed), so I'd like to see that study.
And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.
>
> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.
important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.
For more details, see
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Ov...
Programming articles exist because no one bothered to delete them. I've actually joked about it a decade ago.
I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way. That way they will collectively oppose everything i do. The game grows increasingly absurd as the true colors shine though. I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
Behind my back they write walls of text how to get rid of me. (I wrote some tools to dig into article and user edit history)
But all I do is contribute citations with quality sources, sure I do it in places they don't want to see developed but the decision to have an article was already made, only the real work remains.
The easiest are the articles listed under the fringe category. They are all in terrible shape, sources are easy to find and it instantly enrages the fringe warriors.
Note: You don't actually have to believe something is real to be able to cite a source.
Jimbo is such a fan of tag team editing it can hardly be considered a mistake.
If the wiki followed its own rules and guidelines you could write a guideline for the notability of articles in the programming category.
If you do that now the guideline guardians will tell you with a straight face that no amount of GitHub stars is enough and that no such guideline is needed.
If you provide example articles they will be deleted to prove the point.
One could probably train an interesting llm on deleted wp contributions. There might be more content there than in main space.
Your argument appears to be that you don't need real evidence to dispose of editors.
It seems we agree?
Besides from the obvious cases it is quite subjective what disrupting the project even means.
I'm not trying to stop the character assassination article but I will be a nuance to the process. I will argue this valuable to the project.
Im kinda curious, if a topic is considered a fringe theory, say fringe physics (where the consensus among surviving editors is that it must be denounced as fake until published in a high quality journal) would you oppose including other high quality sources or would you exclude then to help portray the topic as fake?
If one was to reliably demonstrate 1) there to be [say] a giant time travel laboratory, 2) a hundred million research budget and 3) prominent names involved.
Should they now be banned?
(No, I don't believe in time travel)
You literally can't create constructive online communities if you don't do that.
Wikipedia has elaborate guidelines for everything but users have their own ideas.
For example, the guidelines don't grant you the privilege to delete contributions because you've decided not to take the editor seriously.
Imagine reverting and putting it in an edit summary: I don't take this guy seriously
If there are insufficient independent so called reliable sources to establish the so called notability of Odin but it does have 11k GitHub stars. Then you put an infobox on the article that describes the problem.
You then attempt to find sources. If you find nothing that Wikipedia accepts you might have a conversation about sources for programming languages.
Then you end up reading things like the AFD for hackernoon (22 May 2026) Not even worthy of a stub?
Then you wonder how any programming article established so called notability.
I've just looked at php and I don't see any reference from mainstream media, definitely nothing specifically about php.
It doesn't seem notable?
This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.
The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.
Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.
So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)
Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.
Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.
Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.
I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.
It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.
This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.
But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.
I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.
So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.
And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.
Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge.
It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.
Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.
Misrepresenting what another contributor said? yeah you can be blocked.
Disagreeing on what should be in an article? That won't get you blocked. Getting into an edit war about it might. Being "right" is not a valid defense for edit warring.
In general, its not the place for admins to decide what is "true". Its their job to make sure people are behaving in accordance to the rules.
Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face.
I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.
Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.
But other than that?
Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!
After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!
I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.
I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least
I do understand what you are saying though and I don't think that I have a meaningful thing to add in that and Odin is relatively popular within some circles but the question seems to be if its popular (enough*)
Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.
Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.
Second, any serious observer of the programming languages would conclude that Odin is in the top 2-3 contenders for the long-term replacement of C. Even if it never attains the goal of supplanting C, I'd argue its historical importance (within its field) is already on par with Betamax or HD-DVD (adjusted for time inflation).
Finally the field of programmers who are able to work on programming languages they made as their full-time profession is extremely rarified, maybe 10-20 individuals at any given time. It is the ultimate measure of having made it -- what we all dream of. At that point you're practically royalty to programmers, and many will know you by name. That is the level of fame (for there is no other accurate word of it) that gingerbill has attained in this community. This dude is a hall-of-famer. Already. Without a single story written about him in a newspaper!
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.
Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
You are wrong to state that I am motivated by fanatism or jealousy.
I have no involvement whatever with Odin and am in agreement with the parent article (though I think it's personal criticisms veer a bit too far). The creator of Odin using Odin at jangafx is not an appropriate source in my view.
Rather, the shooting of such strays appears to reflect old competitor propaganda pushed on certain social media sites (that traces back to Ginger Bill in different ways) and a sentiment, often regurgitated by certain fanatics of his, where they appear to be upset by vlang's level of success.
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language
Even here, where this quote is taken directly from Ginger Bill's post, shows how wrong he and certain of his followers are. It is not about about Wikipedia mods not liking Odin. Wikipedia has certain rules and reference requirements for articles to survive an AfC or AfD "challenge" and Odin failed.
People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
zig: 71,565
rust: 304,405
golang: 1,246,300
malbogle: 9
The point of Wikipedia is to be verifiable, not accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
Verifiable, in addition to accurate. Not "not accurate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_i...
Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?
An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?
That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.
Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
In other words, just Reddit mods
If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.
Surely if Odin is all that notable, somebody somewhere's written something about it in a SIGGRAPH paper, at least?
For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!