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V Language Review (2023)

n-skvortsov-1997.github.io

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Re: V Language Review (2023)

#31

Post by mirashii »

lkey wrote: post #9

V's claims have always been dubious on their face. It promised the programming language equivalent of magic with no overhead. I'm glad that someone took the time to print receipts. The author clearly wants a reckoning, but he's unlikely to receive satisfaction. The people that still use or evangelize V are locked in, the contradictions will only make their belief stronger. Alex is a bullshitter, and arguing with some…

To top it all off, prominent folks from the V community often engage in flamewars on this exact site. dang has threatened to ban the topic entirely before [1], and honestly at this point I'm pretty supportive of it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37335249

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#32

Post by pornel »

arp242 wrote: post #11

A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress, and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1] We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public projects. There's a lot to be…

I can believe that it’s just overconfidence and optimism gone too far.

The problems they claim to solve look deceptively easy on the surface. Something like escape analysis (required for automatic borrowing without GC or refcounting) has many easy cases, but also incredibly hard or literally unsolvable edge cases.

They may have been encouraged by progress on the easy cases, and assumed the rest is just a matter of a few bug fixes, rather than hitting the halting problem.

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#33

Post by vacuity »

arp242 wrote: post #25
agumonkey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk says "full self driving car next year for 60k" means "partial self driving in 5 years for 75" I don't have a full explanation of why V made me so angry, but coming up with so many bold claims invalidating whole decades of an entire industry is mind boggling for sure.

Ah right. Well, Tesla is a company, whereas V is basically just a few people working on it in their spare time. I don't think you can really compare the two or hold them to exactly the same standards. Or to put it in another way: people can be flawed, and I think that's okay. I don't think it's right to jump on that with assumptions of malice.

I think people (and designers of other languages, in particular) were outraged that not only did V have the very aspirational claims, but there was also a Patreon (or similar) and the general attitude of the newly forming V community that felt undeserved for that level of...aspiration. I think that doesn't quite fall under malice, but I imagine it felt unfair to many.

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#35

Post by fuzztester »

pharrington wrote: post #17
arp242 wrote: post #11

A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress, and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1] We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public projects. There's a lot to be…

Do not say that your software does something that in fact, it does not do.

That should be one of the n commandments of software development.

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#36

Post by [deleted] »

arp242 wrote: post #11

A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress, and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1] We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public projects. There's a lot to be…

[deleted]

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#37

Post by cycomanic »

arp242 wrote: post #11

A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress, and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1] We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public projects. There's a lot to be…

I don't know, if you say you have build a language that solved memory and safety issues without any overhead and performance impact, but in reality everything is a noop, you're lying. You can't claim you have solved some of the most difficult problems in language design but when challenged just say this was an aspirational statement.

Apitational statements require that you have an idea how to get there. Even if you have that idea (why are you not at least saying how it would work), state that this is a goal, not a current status, otherwise it's a clear lie.

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#38

Post by bpfrh »

arp242 wrote: post #11

A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress, and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1] We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public projects. There's a lot to be…

>So the functionality is correct, but not in a way the author would like it to, therefore it's a lie to claim it works. Eh? It's fine to criticize that the implementation isn't any good, of course, but employing such narrow definition of "works" and then calling someone a "liar" over it seems rather, eh, much.

As far as I understood the article the coroutines don't work?

If I write asynchronous code via a coroutine and one coroutine with io prevents all other coroutines from running that is not a working coroutine.

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#39

Post by Cavallium »

12_throw_away wrote: post #13

I know it's a meaningless metric, but I still find myself wondering how, exactly, vlang got to 35K stars on github, very much in the same order of magnitude as, say, cpython with 58K.

A lot of vlang-related statistics are very suspicious, probably some of the metrics are boosted by a click farm or something similar. For example, 99% of the global google searches about "vlang" are from Beijing. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#40

Post by alpaca128 »

arp242 wrote: post #11

A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress, and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1] We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public projects. There's a lot to be…

But then why isn't the documentation updated? If the developer can start projects for UI and 3D graphics before the language is complete, surely there's also time to show at least the will to fix the constantly criticised honesty & transparency issues?

> "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were going to do but never implemented"

Your source also mentions there were just two people working on the code and the manual was finished at release, so nobody except two people had access to unfinished documentation for a program that was done within two years...I don't think this is comparable.

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