Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ring (programming language)

Ring (programming language)

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WP:N from the talk page, and also WP:TOOSOON. Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 09:03, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions. Ceethekreator (talk) 09:23, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Ceethekreator (talk) 09:23, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Fails Wikipedia:Notability (software) and wider WP:N policy, passing mentions outside primary sources. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:39, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete No significant coverage from third-party sources and also no indication of meeting NSOFT. --94rain ^Talk 11:07, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete For the sake of steelmanning, I'll point out that this article in Youm7 could be argued to constitute WP:SIGCOV. But I'm still inclined to delete for a few reasons: a) WP:GNG says that "multiple sources are generally expected", and I can't find any other reliable secondary sources covering this topic b) I don't think this Youm7 article/interview is particularly reliable for establishing the notability of the programming language itself. It's as much about the interviewee (Fayed) as the language. And if this were a notable programming language, I would expect coverage in RS that cover technology/computer science. c) The interview (in Jan 2016) talks about the language as something newly announced which is about to be published. So WP:SUSTAINED and WP:CRYSTALBALL come into play. Update Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated has shrewdly observed below that the author of the Youm7 articles (Hany Salah) is listed as a member of Ring's 'marketing' team. I withdraw my steelman - there's nothing approaching reliable, independent coverage of this language out there. Colin M (talk) 15:49, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- The references are updated, includes two articles published in Youm7 and written by another author (Mones Hawas - Not listed in Ring Team) also Criticism section is added. Charmk (talk) 17:12, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - I appreciate that, but the existence of the article by Salah (whose conflict of interest doesn't seem to be disclosed in the article) makes me suspicious of Youm7 as a whole as a reliable, independent source for this topic. Colin M (talk) 19:05, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - I understand your feelings, but Salah wrote only one article about Ring in 2016 and it looks like they updated the Ring Team page 2 to demonstrates that there is no conflict of interest. Since this updated could be done based on reading this discussion, I think it will be fair to still consider Salah article as primary source, but consider the 2 other articles by Mones Hawas in Youm7 that I discovered and added to the article as secondary resources. Also the article topic establish notability using other resources. Charmk (talk) 22:06, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Keep 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 printed journals, reviewed articles and usage by some companies (enough to establish notability and a lot of references could be added). Also listed in top 100 programming languages by TIOBE Index and it was in top 50 in 2018. Yes popularity is not notability but both of them is good indicator. Charmk (talk) 16:25, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- That ranking uses a dubious methodology based on WP:GOOGLEHITS. "Ring" is a common word that's more likely to produce false positive matches (even when combined with the word "programming") than say, Common Lisp, Erlang, PowerShell, etc. For example, most of the Bing results for "ring programming" after the first couple pages are false positives (e.g. [1] [2] [3] [4]) Colin M (talk) 18:56, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - I listed enough resources that establish notability, for popularity (which is another topic) and the rank in TIOBE Index, Yes some search results doesn't belong to the language but there are many resources related to the language across many websites and people at TIOBE used to adjust the result. A little search about the language lead to Hundreds of samples in RosettaCode A book in Wikibooks, thousands of YouTube videos and blogs by many authors, for example 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, TIOBE uses these results from many search engines to determine top languages. Ring article in Wikipedia is written in many languages by different authors in different countries 1 2 3 4 which is another indicator too. Also I discovered complete translation to the language website and documentation in Japanese 1 2. Charmk (talk) 19:30, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - Has anything notable actually been made using it? Do any notable computer scientists, or businesses, actually use it? There's no response from the Hacker News community. Reddit is completely unfavourable! (Those are the only ones I could find with any comments.) Quora is also completely unfavourable! (Those are the only ones I could find with more answers than just the language creator.) -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 01:21, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      - I haven't checked any of the years for the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey, but I doubt it's included. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 01:42, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - With respect, I listed enough resources that establish notability, popularity and evaluation is another topic but I will answer. listing some resources that provide negative feedback about a programming language reflects popularity and we can do this for any notable programming language, Also we can find positive feedback : Matz (Creator of Ruby language) spreads the word about Ring and he is very known programmer and language designer. A conference paper (Published by ACM) from computer science researchers talking about using Ring to develop a new software 123 4, other links with positive feedback about Ring thousands of messages in Ring Group Ring Book 1 2 3 4 5. Charmk (talk) 03:32, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      - Your sources include the language creator as an (co)author. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 04:33, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        I doubt Matz even so much as looked at it either; "oh look, someone made a programming language based on my own programming language; what a great way to promote my own programming language by merely posting a link, with nothing else to say for it, while advertising the influential status of my own programming language". If he had anything positive to say, then he would have included it; if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all. His favourite languages are Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 04:41, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        Any source including the team is WP:PS. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 04:53, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        In the beginning, I listed enough resources that establish notability through reliable and secondary resources (printed journals, reviewed articles and companies using the language). You are talking about another topics (popularity & developer feedback). for popularity I listed many resources about the language like thousands of movies and blogs by many authors, and for developers feedback. You can add this section (Criticism) to the article using neutral point of view. Charmk (talk) 10:53, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Referring to your original list at 16:25, 10 June 2019 (UTC): #1 is WP:PS; Hany Salah is Marketing. #3 Gold Magic 800 isn't notable. #5 is WP:PS; Majdi Sobain is a Senior Tester. #6 is unfavourable towards all of those languages; moreso towards Ring. #7 says "Ring itself is an unpopular language that does not offer much for non-programmers. It might be hard to get a community started in this. However if the overall Emotiq projects draws enough attention, this could snowball into Emotiq making Ring well known along with it — exactly what happened with Ruby and Rails."; which is WP:TOOSOON since they immediately recommend Emotiq make their own DSL instead in the following paragraph. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 14:44, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - These are enough 1 2 3 4 and the authors are not listed in Ring Team, Also listing 180 members in Ring Team doesn't change their secondary resources about the language to primary resources, because it's clear that Ring 1.0 is developed and published by Fayed alone in 2016 then their names are added after they provided what we can consider as secondary resources (articles, applications, etc) as we notice from the Role column in Ring Team and GitHub contributors. so other references 1 2 are secondary references too, all of this establish notability while being listed in top 100 programming languages by TIOBE Index and it was in top 50 in 2018 indicates popularity which is good too. Charmk (talk) 15:16, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - So there's only 180 total users of the language of all time? And some unknown quantity of them are no longer producing relevant content? But remain listed as such? So the current total users of the language is less than 180? -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 15:55, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      - listing some people providing some content (articles, applications, videos, etc) about a programming language doesn't mean that they are the only users! A lot of people use many software without writing about it (if it's good software that works and comes with good documentation). Again you are talking about popularity which is another topic. (Also some secondary sources indicates popularity). Charmk (talk) 16:10, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        The only way they even got on TIOBE in the first place was because they had a Wikipedia page! As per the second entry in their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). I think this is your one true reason for voting to keep this around; without it, there is no TIOBE, which negatively influences the marketing of the language. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 16:19, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        GitHub only has 159 users, and only 5÷(32+) repositories have stars; the most of which is 2. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 16:37, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        Again you are discussing popularity (not notability), it's not easy to know how many users of a free open source software like Ring, but some links provides some information over 40,000 downloads but GitHub doesn't provide download statistics. Charmk (talk) 17:11, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        Downloads does not indicate continued usage; besides Ring, the other TIOBE languages are actually used in the industry. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 17:43, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikipedia-TIOBE connection makes this WP:PROMO. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 16:49, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- With respect, this discussion is about the content and references, Remember that Wikipedia is not a democracy; even when polls appear to be "votes", most decisions on Wikipedia are made on the basis of consensus, not on vote-counting or majority rule. In summary, polling is not a substitute for discussion Charmk (talk) 17:16, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - This discussion is about WP:N, and WP:TOOSOON; where I have established that any WP:N comes from WP:PROMO marketing schemes. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 17:43, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    - With respect, I listed enough references that establish notability (2 printed journals, 2 reviewed articles, and usage by companies). This is enough for me for this discussion. Charmk (talk) 17:57, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      - It is unsatisfiable for the consensus of this discussion. You argue they are not WP:PS, even though they are authored by current team members; where is the history for that team page on SourceForge to back your claims? The industry usage is unfavourable; usage by Emotiq is condemned by the source (Emotiq never actually used this Ring; it was their own Ring the whole time! This also proves that authors of sources that aren't notable don't even know what they're sourcing about! Since it's probably just a niche fad, and nobody will notice.), and Gold Magic 800 is a primary source that is not a notable game (Steam (software)#Curation says As these processes allow developers to publish games on Steam with minimal oversight from Valve, journalists have criticized Valve for lacking curation policies that make it difficult to find quality games among poorly produced games, aka "shovelware".). There's a low number of verifiable users, and more WP:RS from Egypt is expected from such brobdingnagian download rates. This language isn't even notably bad! There are far worse languages! And the article doesn't even reflect the truth of the language; nobody even wants to use it unless they're in the team! "Oh look, I can list that on my job applications!!! :D" I mean how many graphic designers does it take to make a programming language look worth using? And what does "Vision Achiever" even mean? Is this a religion, or just a programming language? -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 18:57, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        Thanks, The references are updated, includes two articles published in Youm7 and written by another author (Mones Hawas - Not listed in Ring Team). Charmk (talk) 17:26, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        
        They went from 0 graphic designers, to 8 graphic designers; all in the span of 2 months! And the logo never changed after that! -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 19:19, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        In GitHub they have this folder. Charmk (talk) 17:30, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The newly created Popularity section shouldn't mention TIOBE, since Wikipedia is a dependency; the Ring marketing team is good at SEO optimisation, but not anything else really. The rest isn't WP:NEUTRAL! Medium says "Ring itself is an unpopular language that does not offer much for non-programmers.". Ciklum says "many developers perceive Ring as being too similar to other programming languages already in existence; in other words, it doesn’t offer anything innovative.". This language may be WP:N for being the most ambitious job exploitation (I'm aware of), but the article should reflect the below average quality of the language. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 03:03, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Temporal Interval	Download Quantity	Ring Version(s)
2016-01-25	1,870	1.0
2016-01-25+to+2017-01-25	17,688	1.0, 1.1, 1.2
2017-01-25+to+2018-01-25	13,443	1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7
2018-01-25+to+2019-01-25	8,885	1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10
2019-01-25+to+2019-06-11*	2,662	1.10
2019-06-11	13	1.10

This is sufficient evidence of a declining popularity; there's probably a lot of Egyptian click bait for this language. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 04:27, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- I've updated the table to include the version of the language during each temporal interval, which further diminishes the popularity of the language. -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 08:13, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - I updated the article (Popularity, Criticism and References) sections based on your comments, Thanks for this valuable analysis. Charmk (talk) 17:23, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If this was a tree language, it would probably be notable for being the first of its' kind, but tree languages are purely theoretical, and I'm not sure about the (over)ambitious predictions made regarding their future; the first two could be like Turing-completeness (a certain amount of supercritical complexity may be problematic for tree notation), the third one is very challenging (legacy code makes the industry less likely to change languages; changing languages means replacing programmers, and code base, which is expensive), and the last one is confusing (I thought tree languages are high level abstract languages, but they don't go into specifics of levelness, nor abstraction;, and perhaps this is an opportunity to unify all programmers as predicted). -- Shyam Has Your Anomaly Mitigated (talk) 09:22, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the information, I think this could related to the new features provided by the language to support declarative programming. Charmk (talk) 21:33, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]