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embedding-shapetoday at 11:06 AM4 repliesview on HN

> 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".


Replies

amiga386today at 12:29 PM

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.

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cygxtoday at 11:18 AM

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.

minrawstoday at 3:51 PM

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.

andrepdtoday at 12:25 PM

> 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.

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