I chose Odin because it is easily readable. Odin is sufficient or great on other metrics and well-rounded, but I ultimately chose it for readability.
It’s the same reason I was drawn to Python - it’s like a pseudo-code language.
This is important to me for these reasons:
- I can upstart without ‘language friction.’
- My code can be audited by a wide audience.
Point 2 is important and killer to me, it may not be to everyone. Rust, C/C++ and Zig do not have the quality that a person not versed in the language could easily parse a program written in it.
Odin, despite being obscure, I believe will be relatively easy to parse.
If you wanted to try this idea out more generally, then lean heavily on the adage “code is harder to read than to write -” congrats, Odin, you’ve made the hardest part of programming much easier.
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If someone told me, “Look at this language, it’s easy to read.” I’d say, “What do you mean?”
We use the same words but mean different things. What is readable to you may not be readable to others. To be objective, we need to be specific.
3 things affect the readability of code:
amount of symbols
Haskell is an obvious winner.
domain knowledge
Once you have that, readability becomes less of an issue,
and the choice comes down to the amount of symbols and the familiar pattern.
familiar pattern
If the language follows a familiar paradigm,
the solution pattern will probably be familiar to the reader.
But what’s the point of reading something if you don’t understand it?
Understanding the code is more important than reading it.
That understanding comes from domain knowledge and familiarity with patterns.
Whether it is user-friendly depends on the kind of user.
It’s not about the coding style.
What makes Odin great is the very combination of features.
People will come and go, mistakenly assuming that
the Odin language is what they’re looking for.
If you’ve suffered enough using all kinds of programming languages,
you’ll really appreciate this language.
If I could summarize what Odin is in one sentence, it would be the following:
The Odin programming language — short-term pains, long-term gains.
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You were able to read my post but clearly didn’t understand it — which only proves my point. Have a nice day!
I think this is a very important reason for many people like me who chose Odin. The simplicity of Odin, combined with modern programming features, is very appealing.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
– Edsger Dijkstra.
Complex/complicated language makes it harder to reason about the ACTUAL problem. Instead, we will be spending our cognitive effort trying to solve the complexity of the language.
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Odin has felt so natural for me, and it’s helping me learn new good habits. After a couple months I have a decent grasp of most of the concepts from the book, and porting my application has been a blast. My problem space requires many ways to represent the same thing, and the type system has been intuitive even for generics. Things usually just work the first time (so far).
I think what sets Odin apart is I can trust that the language won’t get much more complicated. I have known for a long time that I’ve outlived JS/TS, but the alternatives in the systems world have always felt to be too daunting, being self-taught mostly through web dev, game mods, and CAD/CAE. So, I’ve been able to catch up on many of the foundations of CS I missed, and wish I had started sooner.
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