I thought the funding section was a little odd; I was under the impression that Bill was being paid by JangaFX to develop/maintain the language? But I think the corporate sponsorship of language development should be the norm. If existing languages are not sufficient to solve a business need, then they should pay for the development of a new one (or directly support one they rely on). But making a language "popular" and widely used is directly opposed to making it paid. There are plenty of closed languages out there, but they're only used by the corporations that developed them, and are probably kept closed to make sure the language doesn't stray from their business needs, and/or to maintain a competitive advantage.
Otherwise, I'm generally a fan of Odin, but I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions and participate in the "community" is locked behind discord. I even gritted my teeth and tried to make an account for discord just for this, but discord wouldn't accept my (apparently mandatory) phone number. Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. If I'm learning a language and can't find an answer to a question that was almost certainly asked already, that's just another stumbling block that will prevent me from using said language.
> Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis
There's one option available to small projects and actually you already named it yourself:
> relay bots.
Take for example Nim community. It's not huge by any margin, but we have fairly active forum[0], occasionally active Telegram channel and most of activity is on Discord, IRC and Matrix. I've grouped these three because they're almost seamlessly connected with relay bots into one platform. You can join one of several bridged platforms[1] and talk to everyone on Discord, Gitter, Matrix, etc. with quotes, pings and attachments working as you'd expect them to.
It is certainly an extra burden to moderate and manage all of this, but now you can atleast have an IRC archive[2] that's indexable and searchable [3].
On the other hand, having Discord as your *only* place for discussions is plain stupid (read: foolish). Because I know several people, including myself some years ago, that just 'nope out' from using a project when they see that the only place to get support is a Discord channel.
And if that's the case, me too. I understand that IRC is plain and boring but discord I avoid.
Shame, I've never seen Odin before and got excited over the show cases. I've been looking to tinker with another language outside of the main three, (python, go, rust) and this looks nice.
Otherwise, I'm generally a fan of Odin, but I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions and participate in the "community" is locked behind discord. I even gritted my teeth and tried to make an account for discord just for this, but discord wouldn't accept my (apparently mandatory) phone number. Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. If I'm learning a language and can't find an answer to a question that was almost certainly asked already, that's just another stumbling block that will prevent me from using said language.