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Marketing the Odin Programming Language is Weird
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Odin is a very weird programming
language to advertise or market for.
Now, when I've been designing Odin, Odin
is very pragmatic in its design and just
general philosophy. Unlike all popular
languages out there, it doesn't really
have a killer feature. I've just tried
to design it to solve actual problems
with actual solutions. Those languages
with a killer feature to them do not
make well they do make them stand out
and consequentially it makes them more
hypable. The problem is is those killer
features are usually absolute nonsense
very niche or they rarely have any big
benefit. Hype doesn't make software
better. And that's the thing is Odin
isn't a big idea language but rather an
alternative to see on modern systems. It
tries to solve the problems that other
system languages have failed to address.
The problems are usually very small but
unrelated to each other. It's not
solvable with a single big idea. Now,
Now,
what better way of putting this is name
a single language out today and I can
name the killer feature in that language
itself and why it became popular because
of it. People may complain about the
feature many years later, but that's
what brought them to it.
So before people say, "Oh, Odin's killer
feature is we has none." And I'm like,
"Well, how the heck do you market that?"
That seems to be like an anti-marketing feature.
feature.
There isn't an example of a popular
program language out there today which
hasn't got a killer feature. Even C was
that in many ways with it being a
portable assembly. Now, even if that's
not actually true,
I know I have a bad habit when I ask
when people ask me, "Oh, why should I
use Odin?" And I usually just ask them
then what their needs are, and if those
needs are met with Odin, then I tell
them to try Odin, as well as many of the
other competition to see which they
prefer. I know that's honest English
politeness to a tea. But that that's me
as a man. I want Odin to be as best as
it can be, but without trying to sell
the world to someone in the process. I
want to show people the trade-offs that
each design has and even in other
languages and not ignore those
trade-offs. Look, there's no solutions,
only tradeoffs.
This lack of hyperboolness that Odin
offers is kind of reflected in the
people that seem to be attracted to Odin
in the first place. They seem very
pragmatic. They just want to get on with
programming and as such these are the
kinds of people that don't even share or
hype Odin. So I guess I don't really
want to easily attract the people who
are more driven by hype than pragmatic concerns.
concerns.
I want to make software a better place
and attracting such people is
detrimental to the endeavor in the first
place. Ju just just look at all the
hyped JavaScript frameworks out there
and do they really make software better
or do they just optimize for the
mythical developer experience which just
results in more crap which gets slower
bulkier and of less to the actual user.
Now my my view is kind of like developer
experience is kind of a little scop in
the sense it makes software worse um at
the expense of making the programmer
thinking he is being more productive
when really he is being less so because
the developer experience is optimizing
for that dopamine hit of felt
productivity rather than actual productivity
productivity
So, this is probably why some of my hot
takes on the internet, especially on
Twitter, usually do the rounds every now
and then. I'm trying to find out what
the actual problems are and see what
possible options there there are to
either solve or mitigate them on a
case-bycase basis. A lot of these again
hot takes that I have have been in the
form of kind of like marketing. And
look, I I'm trying to at least give
myself some exposure as well. I am this
is my job. but it's on the internet. Um,
every single one of them is just my
opinion. Um, and usually I think they're
quite mundane, too. But because the
internet is huge, there's going to be
some people who will find those takes
shocking because they've just not heard
them before. And to be clear, I'm I'm
not really asking for Odin to be more
hypable in the first place. I am glad
with the steady, stabby, albeit slow
growth Odin's been getting. The people
who try Odin pretty much always stay for
the long haul as they fall in love with
the language since it does bring them
the joy of programming back. Something
which I do advertise on the website is
the joy of programming aspect but it
it's something which I've not been able
to explain in words very well but rather
it kind of has to be experienced to be believed.
believed.
The other issue with advertising or
marketing a systems level programming
language is that that is a niche.
It is manual memory management and it
has high control of memory layout. It
has SIMD structural array support and
many other things and that's great for
people who need that level of control
but not needed for the general web depth
and and obviously that isn't the
intended audience for Odium, right? But
the problem is is that so the social
media landscape
is the the webdev people those voices
are the loudest and many will actually
shut down the voices of people who
disagree with them just because well
they're not in the webdev domain so they
must be wrong and it's like
a minor issue that people are starting
to think what I'm noticing also with
Odin is um it's just for gamedev. The
problem is that statement makes me laugh
because gamedev is pretty much the most
wide domain possible where you do
virtually every area of programming
possible in it. So the just is is a huge
compliment but clearly it's the wrong
image. It's like saying C++ is just for
gamedev when obviously it can be used
for anything. And again it's the same
with Odin because it's a systems
programming language as well. Odin does
bundle with many game or application
oriented packages but again they are
I know there's
there's another way of thinking about
all these issues is that look the other
problem is is that Odin can be thought
of in a few different ways and so does
many other languages. You can think of
it's just the language itself. the
language plus the compiler, the language
plus the compiler plus the core library
plus the vendor library or you can think
of as the entire ecosystem.
Now I know for certain languages and
people speak of like Python, they
usually think of the entire ecosystem
and I've worked with people who honestly
thought Python was numpy and sciols etc
and that you just had to download them
separately to package it together. They
had no distinction between any of these
concepts. Python in in quote brackets
there uh was just the tool itself.
Since I'm originally a C programmer and
also a language designer, all of these
distinctions are made obviously clear to
me. There is no single C compiler and
they're all different. The standard
library is dreadful and you want to
replace it with your own thing straight
away. But again, C still prevails.
I make these those distinctions because
it make it I believe it makes a lot
things clearer around programming itself
and it helps you to understand what the
flaws are in the tool. Thus you can know
how to mitigate or work around those
issues entirely. But this does require a
higher quality standard than that of the
norm currently.
And then kind of like the final aspect
as well is that
another issue is Odin is free.
And as weird as that sounds, but since
like 20 years ago at the time of
recording, it's n impossible to sell a
compiler. People expect a programming
language and compiler to be free without
caring how much time, money, or effort
goes into building a tool such as that.
Yes, there are compilers that still cost
money like Mat Lab or Mathematica and
such, but again, they were always cost
and they've not got rid of that cost and
they also rely a lot on like students in
universities to keep purchasing it. So,
that's their model. Now, I know Odin
does have a GitHub sponsors page. Yeah.
Yeah, that was a little ad. Sorry. But
we don't make that much really. Um, I'm
happy for all the stuff we making and
thank you so much for all the donations,
but again, it's not definitely enough to
pay anybody fulltime yet. Um, we will
pay for the odd piece of contract work
from time to time when we have the
money. It's only a few weeks here or
there. I would love to have few more
people work, well a few people in
general, not more, just at least one
working full-time on Odin. And but it's
something we can't afford. Um, it's one
of the main motivations too as well
behind all of this is that we want to
pay people for their work.
Open source is a thankless paidless
thing in general. And um
yeah, I think people should just pay
more in general for software. It's just
that we've gotten so used to everything
being free.
So I ask you fellow internet users, how
the heck do you market or advertise
Odin, a systems level programming
language when it does not really have a
discernable killer feature, nor is it
hypable, but its very nature just a
pragmatic language.
Now I've got one hypothesis as to doing
this and you the answer is not to
advertise a language but to make a
library or a package that everybody
wants to use and it just happens to be
only in Odin. So you're doing this
effectively like other languages out
there. The ones that can to come to mind
are going to be Dart and Swift. Dart
people only use Dart for Flutter. I
cannot think of anybody else using Dart
nowadays for anything else but Flutter.
And the other one with Swift is people
are using it mainly because oh it's
better than object quotequote better
than Objective C because it's got better
syntax even though I think Swift is
actually a worse language than Objective
C but people also use Swift because they
want the Swift UI and all the other
libraries that come about it which
aren't necessarily available in
Objective C. So again those people are
using those languages not because of the
languages themselves but because of the
libraries that they want to use to make
products and they just happen to have to
use that language. So, that's my
hypothesis is the best way to target it.
I'm not going to say what I'm going to
be doing that for yet. That'll be for a
later date for you guys to find out. But
again, I do pose this question to you
guys. What is the better way to
advertise or market Odin? Um, because
again, we can't really advertise it like
other languages where you say yes,
that's the killer feature because it
doesn't really have one. And again,
saying it doesn't have one is is one.
Again, that's not marketable. But again,
thank you very much for watching and uh
stay tuned for another video which will
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