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strenholmeyesterday at 1:44 PM1 replyview on HN

>Odin is a proprietary language

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:

https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/LICENSE


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amiga386yesterday at 3:28 PM

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(software...

- 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...

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