I discovered Odin a while ago, and I have to say I am really impressed with it. I would go as far to say it is the most pleasant and ergonomic language I have ever used!
I built a 2D game with it using the Vulkan API and generally had a lot of fun. But I haven’t touched that codebase for quite a long time now.
The reason, is that AI coding models have gotten a lot better in the past 6 months or so. I spend a lot of my professional time working with them, and I have done a ton of projects outside of work with them too. It has opened the door to a lot of things that I simply didn’t have the capacity to do before.
I would agree with the idea that the code they produce is not “optimal”, but for most things it just doesn’t matter. I have completed many projects with them and it has been good enough for all of them.
But it does make me feel sad, because Odin was created at a time when people are writing code by hand less and less, and in many domains, it being a fantastic and enjoyable language is more or less irrelevant.
I don’t know if I have much of a point here, I guess I am just lamenting, and curious to see if others feel the same way. Great language, non-ideal timing.
And I really mean it when I say it’s been the best programming experience I ever had! I just don’t have the motivation to manually program stuff at all at the moment.
If it makes you feel any better, I already wrote/am writing 2 personal pronects that I doubt I ever would have had the mental energy to do in odin pre-AI.
It is an awesome, near-perfect language (just missing the http packages, lol), and while AI has caused some shifts in language usage, for better or worse, the cost-benefit analysis still doesn’t preclude languages like Odin.
In fact, you could argue that AI actually gives Odin an advantage over other modern Cs like Zig.
But that doesn’t stop Zig from having an awesome, vibrant community of users.
At the end of the day, AI is still just a tool, and it ain’t gonna squash all the cool languages
The people/community aspects of Zig is amazing tho, besides package management or language technicalities. It’s way less hostile (despite their AI stance) and more open to people from various backgrounds/industries, even rookies.
I think I learn a lot more from Zig & C++ folks and apply those to my Odin programming.
