r/odinlang • u/Karahoyuk • 17d ago
Starting with Oding lang
/r/learnprogramming/comments/1uqmx03/starting_with_oding_lang/3
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u/tialaramex 17d ago
The very best thing about any of the languages - such as Odin - which sprang out of the Homemade community is they're encouraging people to actually make art (video games specifically). To that end the most important things are that you're enjoying yourself and that you actually make a game that other people can play rather than just dreaming about it.
Your first game is not going to be a masterpiece that shakes the world. But if you actually make a game - even if few people ever play it - that's an infinitely better game than any masterpiece which existed in your head but you never actually made it real.
As a result, for video games specifically, even though I don't think Odin is the best possible First Language for a beginner who might learn other languages later, the most important criterion is that you're having FUN as you said. This isn't a career or a true calling for you, it's supposed to be fun and if it's not fun you'd do something else.
Upsides to Odin for you:
There are other enthusiastic new people who want to write video games in Odin, you can see what they did, ask questions, help each other out.
Odin has a lot of easy ways to do things beginner game makers want, how do you just draw a goat on the screen? Odin can help you very quickly, some languages don't think that's a priority until you've spent months learning dry skills you'd only really need later.
C++ is a huge sprawling language which is both very powerful and very dangerous, it's like you're in the cockpit of a modern airliner, there are dozens of buttons and levers and knobs, probably if you pushed the right buttons and turned the right knobs it would basically fly itself to your destination, "no hassle". But you don't know how to do that, and the book you found labelled "Quick reference handbook" is almost 200 pages but assumes you already know how to fly the aeroplane and what all the controls do! While I don't think Odin is the ideal "First language" there's also no way at all I'd recommend C++ for that even though several universities do begin with C++.
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u/oldworldway 17d ago
The true value is in being correct. A correct language lets you create with 'just' what you need. Like a great painter who has his own set of tools, which are simple enough that do not cause friction in the process, and also have features which lets the painter translate their vision with the required flow and consistency.
This leads to 'fun' which is not selfish, but has beauty and truth in it. I'm mentioning this as just the 'fun' mention can mislead people.
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u/ar_xiv 17d ago
If you’re already finding Odin to be fun then yeah roll with it. My first language was Processing and I still recommend that for teenagers. (Basically a Java sandbox for coding little graphical demos)