Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overpromise and underdeliver. And lots of funding for then vaporware
Isn't that our entire industry though?
Speak for yourself, some of us have principles.
V Language Review (2023)
71–80 of 115 posts
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#72Can someone explain the backstory of what V is and why someone took the time to write this? To the uninitiated this sounds like someone criticizing some kid’s side project. I’m picking up some context clues that V is widely used / famous / notable / significant somehow, but the only time I have ever heard of it before this is Xe Iaso’s similarly negative posts. Did V receive some huge funding grant that made it the t…
When the V project started out the creator of V made some big claims that raised a few eyeballs, they've gained a reasonable following over the years, have a pretty serious looking website (https://vlang.io), a beer-money level Patreon following and some corporate partnerships/sponsors. However they have experienced some pretty brutal takedowns over the years, with some of the bolder claims about the language/compiler often being exposed as untrue and some functionality being broken.
A word I keep seeing in relation to V is "aspirational" - the project aspires to be a serious language and it aspires to have some serious features, so I think it's fair to approach it with a more critical eye than one would a kid's side-project. I think HN would have been pretty understanding if they were open about the state of the various features and were a little less defensive when they encounter articles that review it like a Real Language.
If the authors don't want this kind of feedback they can just say front-and-centre (or on their FAQ @ https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/FAQ) "this is a toy" or "this is pre-alpha" or "this is for research purposes". There are plenty of projects like this which are open about their intent and which don't have posts like this written about them. But I don't think that'll happen, so as it stands the pattern will continue - someone revisits the language every year or so, finds some things that doesn't meet expectations, writes about it and we discuss it on HN again.
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#73I 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=...
"golang" seems to have similar statistics: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
So I'm not sure if that's evidence of metric boosting by a click farm, or anything else. Clicking on the question mark, it looks like it's not really a ranking of "where do searches come from", but rather "how popular is it in this region":
> Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#74A 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…
None of these points apply in this context. The context is that this project has been going on for many years, is popular (using the GitHub stars proxy), and has been criticized before. This isn’t a fourteen year old kid trying to make a language and being naive about what it takes to achieve it.
> I'm not saying the V people have always smelled of roses either, but this article is definitely part of the problem with the general drama and toxicity surrounding V.
Meh. Complaining about the tone is so boring. The author is a bit upset but no one is disputing their technical arguments (I’m relying on others since they know more about it than me).
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this perspective, in theory. Not liking how something is implemented is different than suggesting it isn't implemented. The real damning aspect of this is that criticism surrounding these decisions seems to result in the silencing of the critic. There are times where moderation and banning are necessary, such as when the critic resorts to name calling or trolling. Criticism can lead to more awareness whi…
I've seen this play out a few times now in a few different communities: systemd, Gnome/GTK, wider JavaScript and PHP communities, and probably some others. There is legitimate reasonable criticism of these things, even today. However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are…
> However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are all treated the same by the developers. You kind of need to insulate yourself to some degree.
If you need to insulate yourself to the degree that you ban someone for answering the question “V or Go?” with “Go, obviously”[1] then what’s the point of even maintaining a community? All you’ll end up with is a bunch of yes-women.
[1] Is V production-ready?—no. Is Go? Yes, for a long time.
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The V devs have promised a lot, have missed a lot but have also achieved a lot. I have written a few short programs in V. IMHO, the V syntax is concise and intuitive and the performance is good. It is lightweight and easy to install and to use. The blog post is probably right that V has many rough edges but I would say the core features in V are well planned. I actually prefer it over some other more popular language…
Yeah, when the article skipped over the first two memory management strategies to point out issues with manual memory management and an "automatic" strategy that is unfinished or broken, it really struck me that it's quite impressive for a single author to have a functional, fast language with a working garbage collector and arena allocator (with some issues) in only a few years. The criticisms in the article, which…
The V lang author implicitly claims to understand CS theory better than quite a lot of people including Go and Rust lang devs.
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, when the article skipped over the first two memory management strategies to point out issues with manual memory management and an "automatic" strategy that is unfinished or broken, it really struck me that it's quite impressive for a single author to have a functional, fast language with a working garbage collector and arena allocator (with some issues) in only a few years. The criticisms in the article, which…
I wouldn't say it's impressive. I've seen tons of computer science graduates hooking up gc to their languages in uni when they learn about compilers and programming languages
"link the Boehm GC" got one line on an assignment in my University's compiler's course; it's literally a matter of changing
exec ["ld"; "-o"; out_file; obj_file]
exec ["ld"; "-o"; out_file; obj_file; "-lgc"]
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this perspective, in theory. Not liking how something is implemented is different than suggesting it isn't implemented. The real damning aspect of this is that criticism surrounding these decisions seems to result in the silencing of the critic. There are times where moderation and banning are necessary, such as when the critic resorts to name calling or trolling. Criticism can lead to more awareness whi…
I've seen this play out a few times now in a few different communities: systemd, Gnome/GTK, wider JavaScript and PHP communities, and probably some others. There is legitimate reasonable criticism of these things, even today. However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are…
I dunno, I've been using gimp for literally decades and for about a year recently, it couldn't paste from the clipboard. I didn't even bother reporting the bug because I knew I'd come across like an entitled whiner in today's atmosphere.
Re: V Language Review (2023)
#79V'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…
What's amazing is how large the community became and how strong their love and belief was.
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Re: V Language Review (2023)
#80Earlier 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.
"v" claims to be a language in which you can choose between an "arena", "garbage" and "don't care, do it for me" memory handling, on compile time, without taking care of your code base at all.
That's an extraordinary claim, to say the least. And, as we all know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.