Odin’s Fiasco with Wikipedia

Recently, Brodie Robertson produced a video on the Bizarre World of Wikipedia Deleting Programming Pages. I highly recommend watching the video.

I thank Brodie for covering the Wikipedia fiasco for Odin. We don’t particularly care if Odin is on Wikipedia or not; especially when Wikipedia itself is rarely reliable, but we’ve been dealing with Wikipedia mods for years. Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don’t like Odin as a language and don’t want it on Wikipedia as any form of “advertisement”.

Wikipedia in general is an ideological playground, and the inclusion of articles are gatekept by activists. The Wikipedia Mods  Just like Reddit mods, or even Digg mods back in the day view themselves as “journalists” and trying to do the “morally ideological” thing by only allowing certain posts on there; programming languages are just one example of that. For many people programming languages are a religion to them  I do not know, nor do I care what their preferred language of choice is., rather than just a mere tool. They will try and defend their favourite language at any cost, even if that means not allowing other languages to “advertise”. The entire “whataboutism” defence that is brought up is fundamentally just a legal loophole that they can use to prevent any article they deem not adhering to their position.

I started Odin nearly 10 years ago now  I started Odin in July 2016… I feel old now., and it was never meant to be as big as it was today. Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists. We are really grateful for everyone who enjoys and uses Odin, and we will continue to improve it. A lot of people do not understand how much work goes into making a production-grade programming language—something that can be used in production by companies as their main programming language.

The Wikipedia comments regarding deletion saying that anyone can make a language is true, but those are usually mere toys, and cannot be used for anything useful  If they honestly believe making a production-grade programming language is that easy, I cannot wait for them to make one. And see how long it takes them.. I am grateful that these Wikipedia mods state everything in public, so that we can actually see what their opinions are for everyone to see.

The problem is that the “Programming Community” really lacks any real and well respected journal or discussion of things in general. It really is the Wild Wild West. Sources such as “peer reviewed papers” of programming topics specifically are not necessarily reputable nor reliable  I am not talking about peer reviewed papers in general in other fields which do not act the same as programming. But “Peer Review”, something that didn’t exist until the 1960s, isn’t the be all and end all of reputability or fountain of wisdom. However, I’ll leave that discussion for another day.. Most of the old “reputable sources” are just that: old. No one really reads them, and many of them become places to just advertise specific products and topics. Or focus on whatever is in the hype-cycle that week. Why are certain websites more reputable than others? Who determines that?—especially if no one regularly reads them any more.

And to use the “whataboutism”, other programming languages have sources which I would never class as reputable in the slightest, but they probably belong to a list of sites/sources made years ago when those sites/sources might have been viewed as “reputable”. My hypothesis that some mods just do not like Odin (or myself) is kind of shown in one of the comments even referring to me as “cult leader”. I’d love to be shown some reputable article documenting this accusation  Or any evidence for that matter..

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.

We believe in the coming months with the introduction of things like the native http package and a few other things, that those packages alone will make people think Odin is a “proper language”. We hope that because of all the tremendous effort that everyone who has put work into the language that:

Odin will be an overnight success—a decade in the making.