Comment by mindcrime
4 years ago
There's been quite a lot of techie related content - pages for programming languages, OSS projects, etc. that were deleted as a result of the overly aggressive deletion policies, IMO. No, I'm not going to give you a list though, because I'm not interested in spending my time here arguing over the minutia of whether or not a given page is "really notable". Not wanting to waste my time on that crap is one reason I rarely edit WP anymore, and I'm not going to re-engage in that here. You can find your own examples, or simply disregard my blathering, it's all the same to me either way.
Here's an example: https://deletionpedia.org/en/VList
Ten years ago pjscott mentioned "Phil Bagwell's VList" here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/VList
I've wondered why the VList does not have its own article, nor does RAOTS (cited by Bagwell in his VList paper), which is definitely noteworthy. Instead both are limited to one-sentence descriptions in the Dynamic Arrays page. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_array#Variants]. That more programmer don't know about these two structures is almost criminal, and we're generally stuck with linear complexity linked-lists in almost every language because of it. If these were included in the comparison table on the same page, they would make the ones which are included look bad.
The article on the Kernel Programming Language [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(programming_language)] was deleted some years back, yet is still referenced on the page for fexprs [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr]. Deletion log here:[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid...].
> "Minor, academic programming language. Only affiliated references, viz. a tech report by the inventor and his webpage. Some surfing brought up multiple implementations, but no use, no widely-cited papers, no in-dep.."
Kernel is a very innovative language which addressed some time-old complaints about fexprs, and gives a completely new perspective and ways to think about programming, along with a formal calculus to reason about it. [http://web.cs.wpi.edu/%7Ejshutt/kernel.html] I actually discovered Kernel via wikipedia when researching fexprs, and it later became a major focus of my research.
Kernel has been discussed many times on here and elsewhere. It has dozens of implementations. Unfortunately, John Shutt passed away last year, so it is unlikely we will see further developments to Kernel itself.
My best guess is that the deletionist simply didn't understand the topic they were deleting.