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Odin 1.0 Announcement

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Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Are you making a joke? Because while it objectively could be one, it doesn't sound like one. The random ginger dude is the creator of Odin.

It's probably a joke, because Odin was deleted from Wikipedia for being "not notable" recently, and the author thought it was because of his politics. I do think the guy's politics suck, but I also think his language's wiki page was probably targeted for it.

Ah, that changes thing. That actually makes the joke better.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#22

There's something seriously off about this ginger bill guy. In addition to copying most of Odin from Jai, Bill copied Jon Blows announcement to his announcement as well as the fake surprised "oh I didn't see you there" opening for the real announcement. He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai, and even said "after ten years of hard work its finally here." Any one of those things you coul…

What would you say is similar between Odin and Jai? I briefly used Jai (I have never had access) and found that essentially only declaration syntax is familiar.

The entire concept of Odin seems to be taken from Jai. They're both aiming to be C/C++ replacements "for the joy of programming" (another thing that was in the early Jai videos that Bill ripped off). In addition to the syntax (which is eerily similar across the entire language), there is the "using" keyword, the "defer" keyword, the context system, custom allocators, native AoS, polymorphic procedures, etc.

Again, any one of those things on it's own is not a smoking gun, and many of these features and syntax are becoming standard in modern languages. But the fact that SO MANY of Odin's features and even it's marketing strategy seems to be copying Jon Blow is weird to me. You can still go watch Jon's videos demoing early Jai from 11 years ago...and if you check the comments you'll see a familiar ginger face, so there's no doubt Bill saw those videos when they came out, and began developing Odin AFTER he saw Jai.

If he was simply inspired by Jon that's fine, there's nothing wrong with more well-thought out programming languages in the world. But when you copy a lot of the language, copy the announcement to the announcement video, copy the announcement video, and also plan to release at the exact same time as Jai, while largely denying that Jai had any influence of your language, red flags will go off for anyone that's paying attention.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#23

There's something seriously off about this ginger bill guy. In addition to copying most of Odin from Jai, Bill copied Jon Blows announcement to his announcement as well as the fake surprised "oh I didn't see you there" opening for the real announcement. He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai, and even said "after ten years of hard work its finally here." Any one of those things you coul…

I think both Bill and Jon have discussed this at length and are both mutually respectful of what problems each are trying to solve, could be wrong. At the least, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that Odin is "mostly copied" from Jai just because they have a few similarities and share inspirations.

See [1] where Bill discusses the influences and where they've diverged longer-form.

[1]: https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/wiki/Odin-vs-Jai

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#24
post #4

I kind of like Odin, with its Pascal/Modula-2 influences, even if the community is a bit hardcore on some of their ideas. Love the books in the background, and the whole video. It is also nice that Odin takes the batteries included approach. How well it would fair in the mainstream remains to be seen.

What kinds of project would Odin be best suited for, as compared to, say, Rust or Go?

By far the best feature (IMO) is that it has no trouble talking to the most important Windows COM libraries (like DirectX) and the Objective-C runtime (for Metal), and this comes as "batteries included", not some random third party library you have to download.

So for any sort of visual engine development (game engines being the most obvious, but also applications like blender or the JangaFx suite which is the main user of Odin), it is great. What you need is just there ready to go.

The language design itself is very much oriented around appealing to people who do this sort of work.

Other than there isn't much to the language really. It lacks a "big idea" feature like Rust's lifetimes or Zig's comptime. The closest thing to a "big idea" is the rejection of package managers but that's not really part of the language.

It's pleasant to use and compiles fast. Hard to complain.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#25
post #4

I kind of like Odin, with its Pascal/Modula-2 influences, even if the community is a bit hardcore on some of their ideas. Love the books in the background, and the whole video. It is also nice that Odin takes the batteries included approach. How well it would fair in the mainstream remains to be seen.

Odin is not the only language with Pascal influences, as that applies to Golang and Vlang too.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#26

There's something seriously off about this ginger bill guy. In addition to copying most of Odin from Jai, Bill copied Jon Blows announcement to his announcement as well as the fake surprised "oh I didn't see you there" opening for the real announcement. He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai, and even said "after ten years of hard work its finally here." Any one of those things you coul…

There is also a strong argument about whether or not Odin can survive the public release of Jai. Which is rumored to be this year, but who knows if that will prove true.

Debatably, Odin's limited success, is due to Jai not being available to more of the public.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#27
post #25
post #4

I kind of like Odin, with its Pascal/Modula-2 influences, even if the community is a bit hardcore on some of their ideas. Love the books in the background, and the whole video. It is also nice that Odin takes the batteries included approach. How well it would fair in the mainstream remains to be seen.

Odin is not the only language with Pascal influences, as that applies to Golang and Vlang too.

Sure, but at least Odin embraces more stuff than Go, with its design mindset.

It has naturally the influences that came via Oberon-2.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#28
post #26

There's something seriously off about this ginger bill guy. In addition to copying most of Odin from Jai, Bill copied Jon Blows announcement to his announcement as well as the fake surprised "oh I didn't see you there" opening for the real announcement. He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai, and even said "after ten years of hard work its finally here." Any one of those things you coul…

There is also a strong argument about whether or not Odin can survive the public release of Jai. Which is rumored to be this year, but who knows if that will prove true. Debatably, Odin's limited success, is due to Jai not being available to more of the public.

What is the strong argument exactly? Odin coexists happily with Zig, Rust, C3, nim already, no?

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a strong argument about whether or not Odin can survive the public release of Jai. Which is rumored to be this year, but who knows if that will prove true. Debatably, Odin's limited success, is due to Jai not being available to more of the public.

What is the strong argument exactly? Odin coexists happily with Zig, Rust, C3, nim already, no?

Odin is different enough from those languages, where coexistence and what is offered should not be so much of a problem. Unless, out of sheer competitive or corporate spitefulness against others (the less, the better thinking) and for higher rankings, they feel compelled to reduce user choice.

Jai, on the other hand, arguably appeals to the same groups and circles as those that are or might be attracted to Odin. That even appears to go for their creators, where similar demographics of fans would likely choose Jonathan Blow.

Re: Odin 1.0 Announcement

#30
post #26

There's something seriously off about this ginger bill guy. In addition to copying most of Odin from Jai, Bill copied Jon Blows announcement to his announcement as well as the fake surprised "oh I didn't see you there" opening for the real announcement. He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai, and even said "after ten years of hard work its finally here." Any one of those things you coul…

There is also a strong argument about whether or not Odin can survive the public release of Jai. Which is rumored to be this year, but who knows if that will prove true. Debatably, Odin's limited success, is due to Jai not being available to more of the public.

I think plenty of people will still use Odin, primarily because there's a lot more batteries included, but everything about this announcement makes me think Bill is worried about the competition, and trying to showcase his 1.0 with all his batteries...while releasing around the same time as jai. Kinda weird behavior imo.
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