This article was nominated for deletion on 23 March 2026. The result of the discussion was delete.

It's fairly well known, and there is at least one independently written book on the language that I know of (see https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Odin-Programming-Language-Zylinski-ebook/dp/B0DQ1V7LW4)

These days it is also sufficiently noteworthy for Github to have its own highlighting.

I think it was rejected last time several years ago, but it's been growing ever since. I'd like to hear the opinion on this. (I personally have no real stake in this, I am the author of a competing programming language, C3) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clerno19 (talk • contribs) 14:25, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Clerno19: I have restored the draft, in case you're interested in working on this. ✗plicit 14:46, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

A self published book won't build the case for notability. Reliably published sources are still needed. As far as I can tell none exist. MrOllie (talk) 17:43, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

With computer magazines essentially dying off it's much less easy these days to find references.

Bill has been featured on a lot of podcasts for Odin, a quick googling:

Prime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVa9mgRcVPs

The Game Engineering Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mbrLxAT_QI

Developer Voices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKYdj0f1iQI

Context Free

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YLA4ajby00

Mr. 4th Programming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K8znjWN_Ig

Mike Shah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXUfD5c5wp4

Cakez

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=braSC-5wAwk

These are all fairly well known Youtube / Podcast channels with Prime being the biggest with 800k subscribers and then the rest ranging between 10k - 30k.

Are these worth mentioning? I can't remember the last time I read The Register for example, which is I think what Zig relied on for noteworthiness. Such publications are sadly completely replaced by podcasts, Hacker News and Reddit. Clerno19 (talk) 20:52, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Podcasts and youtube videos are considered to be self published - they do not build the case for notability and are typically not considered to be worthwhile sources at all. Leave them out. Programming languages are well studied by academics - when one is actually notable we'll see articles in peer reviewed journals and books from major publishers. There ought to be no need to rely on social media. MrOllie (talk) 21:01, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Ok, then I don't have anything in addition to this. At least this draft now has:

1. References to when the language was started

2. References to when it was first accepted as notable enough for GitHub Linguist

3. References to first book on Odin

Can this draft be archived so that it can be continued later when more secondary sources may be found please? Clerno19 (talk) 21:18, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia doesn't keep drafts around indefinitely, it'll stick around for 6 months and then be re-deleted. MrOllie (talk) 21:23, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I mean, this one was restored from something, wasn't it? I was just adding to it, not writing it from scratch. Clerno19 (talk) 21:25, 24 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

“youtube videos are considered to be self published” is not necessarily true. While it is true that anyone can publish a youtube video claiming whatever, in the last decade there has been an increasing number of channels that have an editorial pipeline, gathering information, citing sources and double checking with different experts. On top of that, a self published is not automatically disqualified because it is self published. There has been cases like the Mould effect which was first described in a youtube video and the story of superpermutations which (somehow) leads into an Anonymous 4chan poster. I am not saying that this particular youtube videos pass the criteria to be reliable enough to prove notability, but we cannot discard something just because it is a youtube video. This is specially relevant if we consider that this sources are not used as source for the article itself, but as proof of notability. ~2026-24316-33 (talk) 21:02, 20 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Self published is 'automatically disqualified' for determining whether or not we'll have an article on a subject. They are specifically excluded as 'proof of notability' (see WP:N). We absolutely can (and will) discard it on that basis. MrOllie (talk) 21:28, 20 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

please note that "self published" and "youtube" are not synonyms. If LTT or any other general chanel does a video about Odin, it is not published by anyone related to Odin but is coming from a quite independent news entity. That does not sound like self-published by the Odin creator and should be considered notable. Gunstick (talk) 23:58, 20 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

'Self published' does not mean 'not published by anyone related to Odin', it means the author and the publisher are the same. 'Independent' is necessary but not sufficient - read WP:N again carefully. So the distinction you are drawing here is a false one - all the proffered youtube links are clearly self published.

It ought to be obvious why self published sourcing does not build a case for notability, but since it apparently isn't I will explain - if self published sources were used in this way, there would be no bar for inclusion to Wikipedia at all, because anyone could scrape up a couple of youtube videos or blog posts or whatever about any topic. MrOllie (talk) 00:03, 21 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Let's take your own definition to prove that “self published” and “YouTube” are not synonyms. If doctor James Grime publish something in Numberphile, the author is James Grime, while the publisher would be Brady Haran. Just because the medium is YouTube, it doesn't mean is “self published”. I am trying to make this distinction for 2 reasons. The first one is because this discussions are how precedents gets stablished making rules to stay or change so wording must be precise. Second, it is no news that many YouTube channels have transformed into publishers of multiple authors without making it public, as an example, Veritasium is no longer Derek Muller's self-published channel, but they didn't make it public for years, making the distinction between a self published YouTube video and a non self published YouTube video very difficult to tell apart. Also you said that “Self published is 'automatically disqualified'”, but that's just false, in WP:RSSELF it says “Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter.” begging the question “Are this authors experienced enough to be considered reliable?”. Finally, in WP:N where is says “...non-promotional self-published sources... are still not evidence of notability as they are not a measure of the attention a subject has received”, which would be true, except that YouTube do measure the attention a subject has received and just the videos presented here account for more than 300,000 views, so that would beg another question “If a measure of the attention a subject has received has been made, what would be a reasonable threshold to consider it notable?”. ~2026-24578-89 (talk) 16:15, 21 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

This is drifting away from the question of "do the above YouTube videos count towards notability?" The vast majority of YouTube channels are self-published; big channels like Numberphile are rare exceptions. And "not self-published" does not automatically mean the source is reliable. Wikipedia is also very strict on which self-published "expert sources" count as reliable: this at a minimum requires that their "work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications".

Apart from reliability, most of the above YouTube videos are also not independent sources, another requirement for a source to count towards Wikipedia's definition of notability. This is because most of the videos are interviews with the lead developer talking about his own project. An independent source needs be someone unaffiliated with the language discussing it, not just trying to get the developer's thoughts.

Notability (again, this is Wikipedia jargon, not how the word "notability" is typically used) is a measure of coverage in reliable independent sources, not general popularity. There are plenty of YouTubers with millions of subscribers and billions of views who cannot have a Wikipedia article at this time (but potentially could in the future) because they have not received enough coverage in reliable sources. Helpful Raccoon (talk) 20:18, 21 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello. There are some references to Odin in scholarly sources which may be relevant. I will admit that these may not be "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" as mentioned in the Wikipedia notability article. Two of these are thesis statements, so I don't know if they would count as reliable, and the two articles in peer-reviewed journals don't focus primarily on Odin.

• Cross-Platform Game Development Without Game Engines (reliable?): This thesis statement from the Häme University of Applied Sciences gives a two-paragraph description of Odin, one focusing on its history and another focusing on its strengths. It also mentions Odin in many other places, since the article is about engine-less game development and the author wrote an engine-less game in Odin as part of the larger thrust of the article.
• EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OK: Implementing a tiny virtual machine, assembler, and compiler (reliable?): This thesis statement from the New College of Florida describes the author's implementation of those three things. They wrote the assembly language in C, but they wrote the programming language that targets this assembly language in Odin, and mentioned wanting to re-implement the assembly language in Odin.
• Efficient Data Exchange between WebAssembly Modules (significant?): This article in the peer-reviewed journal Future Internet mentions Odin as a language which facilitates the use of Data-Oriented Design due to focusing on Karmem, a fast binary serialization format which planned to support code generation for Odin. (Karmem does support that now.)
• Approaching closures in unmanaged languages: a comparison between C++, Rust, and Swift (not significant): This is just here in case someone else wants to use this as evidence, because to me, it's very obviously not a significant mention. (It mentions Odin as a language which has "first-class functions in some way that could be compared to the languages in this article" in a single sentence at the very end.)

In case someone else wants to add to this with scholarly articles, please keep in mind that articles referencing "Odin" in the context of programming may be talking about something else called Odin, such as the multiprocessor architecture or the SDN framework.

I am sorry for putting the onus on somebody else to verify whether or not these documents are notable sources, but I don't really have the skills to do that. Thank you for your time. ~2026-25358-72 (talk) 15:50, 25 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Undergrad theses are never reliable sources on Wikipedia. The other two are just mentions (in Wikipedia parlance this is called a 'trivial mention') and do not help the case for notability. MrOllie (talk) 15:58, 25 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

For whomever shows up next: you're not going to find the sort of sourcing you need with a google search right now. People have looked. I've looked. It just isn't out there. We're waiting for something new to be published. MrOllie (talk) 16:02, 25 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Just a "is Odin actually relevant" sanity check, regardless of WP:GNG. If someone could publish this original research that took 20 minutes in a magazine that would be great.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/ Downloaded 2025 CSV, found relevant columns and filtered for "Odin" (whole word search to avoid "coding"-style results)

Was the programming language you use not listed above? List below, separated by a comma and a space for each, the programming language(s) you used in the past year.

Odin: 57 write-ins (for comparison, Julia: 196, Nim: 38)

Was the programming language you want to use not listed above? List below, separated by a comma and a space for each, the programming language(s) you want to use next year.

Odin: 79 write-ins (Julia: 250, Nim: 69)

Loverthehater (talk) 21:48, 1 May 2026 (UTC)Reply