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

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.

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.)

I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.

> 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.

I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.

It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.

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.

It's been here a few times, maybe 4-6 times in the past year?

I have only heard about it because of HN.

I feel like if you’re into programming languages as a hobby, the chances you know of Odin are pretty high. Not everyone can know everything, of course, but my impression is that it punches above average on notability within the niche.

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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.