bsrkf

When I look at a programming language site, especially for a "new" language, I want a quick way to navigate to a reasonably sized decent code sample, ideally documented, showing off significant language features, idiomatic syntax and usage patterns etc...

Sites which do this well (just from the top of my head):

  https://odin-lang.org/
    immediate code sample visible
    "See the Full Demo"
    "See More Examples"

  https://ziglang.org/
    immediate code sample
    scroll down a bit, "More Code Samples"

Here on red-lang.org... I can barely find a consecutive meaningful chunk of code... ?

  "Getting Started" Nope
  "Documentation" Nope
  "Official Documentation" link to github
    https://github.com/red/docs/blob/master/en/SUMMARY.adoc
  "Home"
    merely a chronologically sorted blog
    newest entry links to 50 line "script" by chance
      showing off multi-monitor support
      (doesn't seem like a super helpful sample)

?

  "Perhaps this explains why Odin has found such widespread usage and popularity. /s"

What an unnecessarily snark and dismissive comment to make about someone's work.

  - I'd say within a certain niche Odin is becoming well known and gets its use
  - you do realize using an `Odin package` is putting a program into a sub-folder and that's it
  - It comes with a rich stdlib + vendor libraries out of the box
  - and isn't it kind of up to the creators how to design and promote their language

I'd even argue it's laudable a language doesn't promote itself as a "fixes everything use me at all costs" kind of technology. The creator himself tells people it might not be the right tool for them/their use case, encourages them to try other languages too, sometimes outright tells them Odin doesn't fit their needs and xyz would probably do better.

Odin is pragmatic & opinionated in its language design and goal. Maybe the lack of a package manager is the basis for you to disregard a programming language, for plenty of others (and likely more Odin's target group) it's the least of their concerns when choosing a language.

Can't benefit from them patching a security issue, but don't suffer from

  - them breaking something
  - a supply chain attack
  - them making a change which breaks your program
  - you having accidentally relied on a bug or an unintended behavior of their code
    (which they may fix at any moment)
  - many unneeded LOC in your codebase
  - absolution of ownership
    - relying on a dependency versus having written it yourself
    - in the latter case you'll automatically take responsibility
    - think much more about code's security/quality
    - have the knowledge to fix it and know exactly where to
      (in your 35-lines of code you yourself wrote)
  - more burdensome upgrades of your software
  - longer compilation speeds
  - having to monitor their program
    - is it abandoned, ownership transferred to dubious party
    - did the maintainer have a late night drunken stupor accepting bad pull requests
    - did they react to a CVE or not
    - did they change the license
    - do they have a license but added their own problematic paragraph
    - does the program "develop badly"
      (change its target scope in any problematic way)
      (take on more and more bloat, more unneeded functionality)
  - having worse of an overview of your total dependencies 
    (since they may themselves rely on further crates you don't expect)
  - ...

what's the trade-off now?

Thanks for the answer, very nice of you to take the time even hours after.

Guess it makes sense; I'm self taught myself, but thought academically taught developers should have a leg up in theory and mathematics, at the same time though, at one point I considered further formal education for myself (in at least paid courses and such), I realized that I don't think there's much I can't teach myself with the resources available (which includes high quality university lectures which are available for free).

Thanks for your perspective.

Nowhere have I claimed that the whole product would need (nor should) be fully open source and why wouldn't non-US wages help?

Assuming it takes me X-amount of software engineering hours to produce an alpha version of a given product and now let's imagine a rented office space plus four developers; consider renting in a major US city, and paying competitive US-major-city-wages versus doing so in a significantly smaller city in Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia).

In both cases you could develop an English-Language version of your product for global use and you can distribute software cheaply over the internet; you'd still charge customers in the US US-prices, yet would have saved on development costs.

I'm sure this comes with its own set of difficulties, especially regarding US business customers, but initially it could be an advantage in certain scenarios.

There also seems to be a current push towards non-US (sometimes even specifically from-EU) products in tech, which might give one an interesting market position, albeit I'm lacking details here, and it's yet to pan out how viable this trend is long-term of course.

Makes sense, out of all the potential differentiators the source of skill attainment simply isn't the necessarily dominant one. Thanks for the answer :)

Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average.

If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.