The V Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: The V Programming Language

#171

Post by reikonomusha » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

endymi0n wrote: post #165

Despite the immense neophobia of Hacker News, I'll jump forward and say I think there's a lot to love around vlang. Go is an amazing language and my go-to language for most backend tasks these days, but often when jumping back from Python, it feels needlessly cumbersome. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about any "magic", Go is exactly as great as it is, because it's so simple and barebones. I'm talking about…

I didn’t see any immutable data structures in V. I just saw disallowing assignment of variables. But I can still assign an object which itself is mutable, and mutate that elsewhere.

Re: The V Programming Language

#172

Post by holy_city » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #145

SwellJoe wrote: post #141

It's pretty unclear what its purpose is. The examples look somewhat like go (including something that looks like goroutines, right down to being called with `go`). So, what differentiates V from go, I guess? (Or whatever other language it views itself as competing with, if not go.)

Compared to Go, taken from [1] V is very similar to Go, and these are the things it improves upon: - No global state - No null - No undefined values - No err != nil checks (replaced by option types) - Immutability by default - Only one declaration style (a := 0) - Much smaller runtime - Much smaller binaries (a simple web server written in V is 65 KB vs 7 MB in Go) - Zero cost C interop - No GC - Much faster serializ…

Global state is a feature, not a bug. It's absolutely necessary for a number of application domains and disallowing it by design makes the V language totally unsuited for them

Re: The V Programming Language

#173

Post by reikonomusha » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

cooperadymas wrote: post #161

chubot wrote: post #142

Hm I looked around the repo, and there doesn't seem to be much there. $ find . -name '*.v'|xargs wc -l|sort -n ... 314 ./glm/glm.v 330 ./time/time.v 338 ./builtin/utf8.v 339 ./examples/tetris/tetris.v 490 ./os/os.v 630 ./compiler/scanner.v 644 ./compiler/table.v 712 ./gg/gg.v 814 ./builtin/string.v 845 ./compiler/main.v 848 ./compiler/fn.v 3216 ./compiler/parser.v 12573 total I'm a big fan of compact code, i.e. doing…

I can't understand criticising a brand new, v0.0.12 language built entirely by one person of being too small...

A lot of people have been finding the development of the project on a monthly basis. The work that has actually been done might be unsettling to the patrons.

Re: The V Programming Language

#174

Post by high_derivative » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

estebank wrote: post #162

In case the author ever reads this: assuming good faith, the effort and intent is laudable, but you've put the cart in front of the horse by having multiple amazing claims that would take many, many man/years to accomplish by experienced developers, which is why they've been received with a lot of skepticism. Even assuming a great level of skill, the claims a priori are hard to take serious, even before taking into c…

Would you have some links to the backlash? Where are these discussions on his language taking place?

Re: The V Programming Language

#175

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

I knew nothing about this project until I saw rants here and on reddit the past week about it. I think many of us have been here; in my opinion (which is just an opinion) this guy got in over his head like we all did when we had limited experience in doing a particular project. I have often thought that I could finish a momentum task in x weeks because in my head it really was a few 100 simple tasks and that was it. In reality ofcourse, it turns out to be a 1000 of simple and not so simple tasks, many of which actually were not very simple. And more importantly; I had never done them before.

That is not malice, it is just inexperience and this guy really looks inexperienced because he knew this would not hold up when he was pressured to release the source. Keeping optimistic and thinking that he is further than he is even though it is quite provable that he is not, is also a symptom of this programmers disease.

It is related, I think, to the 80/20 rule which fresher programmers do not even want to admit to; this is even more extreem as the 80% has not been reached yet, but the author thinks he is actually past the 80%.

I could be wrong and it could be malice, but reading his responses and everything I read the past days about this, I would say it's the same as what I had when I was a teenager going with my father to where he worked and claiming that there must be something wrong because why did it take so long to program these computers while I could 'write code really fast'. 30 years later I still can 'write code really fast' but I know that has not much to do with finishing a project (in time or at all).

It is insane what he set out to do really; write a language to write a moving project in, including docs and examples etc. For me, if he would've been more realistic about the deliveries/timelines (just take a few years man!), I would've actually sponsored him and if he turns out to not be a fraud I still might. We have not so many people who dream big; we do need results though...

Edit: I described the Dunning-Kruger effect; forgot the name. I grew over it by getting more experience (I got into some pretty hairy and complex projects when I hit 18 and that taught me that reality really is very complex).

Re: The V Programming Language

#176

Post by ylluminate » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #173

cooperadymas wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand criticising a brand new, v0.0.12 language built entirely by one person of being too small...

A lot of people have been finding the development of the project on a monthly basis. The work that has actually been done might be unsettling to the patrons.

As a patron of his work, I'm thrilled with what he's doing.

Re: The V Programming Language

#177

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

high_derivative wrote: post #174

estebank wrote: post #162

In case the author ever reads this: assuming good faith, the effort and intent is laudable, but you've put the cart in front of the horse by having multiple amazing claims that would take many, many man/years to accomplish by experienced developers, which is why they've been received with a lot of skepticism. Even assuming a great level of skill, the claims a priori are hard to take serious, even before taking into c…

Would you have some links to the backlash? Where are these discussions on his language taking place?

On Reddit and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632

Re: The V Programming Language

#178

Post by gravypod » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

crimsonalucard wrote: post #166

FpUser wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not in my opinion. With modern development tools/frameworks providing memory leaks detection I have completely forgotten when was the last time that my programs leaked memory. And I write complex high performance game servers that run for months non stop. You just have to acquire certain culture/behavior when writing code.

What languages/tools/frameworks/behavior are you using to develop these game servers with no leaking memory?

I've found valgrind and the clang static analysis tools to be a pretty nice combo.

Re: The V Programming Language

#179

Post by estebank » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

high_derivative wrote: post #174

estebank wrote: post #162

In case the author ever reads this: assuming good faith, the effort and intent is laudable, but you've put the cart in front of the horse by having multiple amazing claims that would take many, many man/years to accomplish by experienced developers, which is why they've been received with a lot of skepticism. Even assuming a great level of skill, the claims a priori are hard to take serious, even before taking into c…

Would you have some links to the backlash? Where are these discussions on his language taking place?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610971

https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/319 (issues are being deleted https://mobile.twitter.com/boy_edgey/status/1142507034446876... )

https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/c3t3...

Searching on twitter you'll find some light roasting.

Re: The V Programming Language

#180

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 22, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #140

Maybe it would be better to change the link to [1] ? [1] https://github.com/vlang/v

Normally we would, but this case is a little subtler. The project had a big thread a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632. The issue arose there that the language was not open source yet. Submitting this commit must be a response to that.

We mark follow-up posts as dupes unless they contain significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). In this case, the significant new information is the open-sourcing, so I think it makes sense to leave up.