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As an (anonymous) programming language designer, a few bits of feedback. First, nice concept, but without open code, it might as well not exist, and without op

As an (anonymous) programming language designer, a few bits of feedback. First, nice concept, but without open code, it might as well not exist, and without open specification, it might as well be yours alone, like one of Tolkien's languages. Closed languages wither and die, and yours seems well onto that path. Second, what makes V compelling to you appears to be completely uninteresting to me in terms of language design. It might as well compile from V to Go; I can't see why not! Whenever a language designer appeals to simplicity, they are usually appealing to whatever makes it possible for them to be productive, and they are usually missing that the productivity is personal because the designer is the one who builds the language. The GL demo seems to be a great example of this sort of situation. I hope that you publish your work so that we may properly critique it. Edit: Here is another language designer who is not me saying "closed languages die" (https://blog.golang.org/open-source https://blog.golang.org/open-source). I think that, until we actually have a compiler for V (or whatever it is hopefully renamed to before release) in our hands, we ought to be extremely careful about trusting that any of this exists. It is all too common in PLT/PLD for somebody to come in with bold claims, outrageous mockups, and zero toolchain. I addressed what I saw, which is yet another compiles-to-Go hobby language. To become more than that requires a committed community and a common repository of open code, and the author appears to have only the former.

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
> I hope that you publish your work so that we may properly critique it. I don't know about this author, but for me, this would emphatically not be a motivating reason to publish my work. I might publish work so that someone could get some use out of it, or to show off my brilliance. But if all you're going to do is critique it (no doubt with all the familiarity born of five minutes of looking at the tutorial), then I'd just as soon you never see it. >Here is another language designer who is not me saying "closed languages die" (https://blog.golang.org/open-source https://blog.golang.org/open-source). I don't think the person you're quoting would advocate that languages must start out as open source. Go sure didn't. It was developed closed source within Google for two years before it was even announced.
- doesnt_know 8y ago
  I guess it depends on how the critique is delivered. I would unironically love it if an expert level in [repo language] would come along and critique my open source code. If they were an arrogant shit-head then I'd probably just block them, regardless of the technical merit of what they wrote.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Sure. But an AC on HackerNews? Not so much.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      casual criticisms on hackernews are still more valuable for drawing attention to your project than in depth comment chains from renowned experts on [repository manager of choice].especially since those comment chains are undiscoverable unless you're already interested in the project(or the chain gets linked on hackernews) plus this may just be me as a non (designing a tool language for a project) dunce speaking but reading a critique of a language/framework that i haven't thought of makes me want to try out the language and see how that shortcoming affects the way i work. it's the reason i tried out Go and Elm and Vue.js
wilg 8y ago
It's not necessary for it to be a general purpose programming language, though. I think it is kind of neat to have a very specific, personal language that fits your mental model. On a larger team, probably not what you want, but there are other languages that are optimized for that. Basically you're right if the creator wants a widely-adopted general-purpose language. But there's other valid approaches I think.
amedvednikov 8y ago
Like it says on the website, the language will be open-sourced later in 2019.
ww520 8y ago
> Closed languages wither and die, and yours seems well onto that path. This is unnecessary harsh. The author has already said it will be open sourced later. I can understand the reasons to not open source now. Managing an open source project is no small work. Second, notwithstanding V's slim feature set, it's already more successful than 99% of language design attempts out there in that it ships. It certainly succeeds in letting the author to build his other projects faster and easier. It fulfills the author's own needs. I'm sure Perl and Python started that way.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  look at the authors comments in this thread, he's been known to miss deadlines before. open sourcing is probably gonna be really really delayed
  - adamrezich 8y ago
    jeez man is any of that really necessary
  - warent 8y ago
    This is engineering we're talking about. Deadlines and time estimations are a hard problem.
  - ww520 8y ago
    This is his personal project. He really does not owe anyone anything, deadline or no deadline. Open source "users" have been getting really entitled these days.
  - omeid2 8y ago
    As per contractual obligation of the author you can withhold pay and demand damages... oh wait.
dom96 8y ago
> It is all too common in PLT/PLD for somebody to come in with bold claims, outrageous mockups, and zero toolchain This. It's crazy to me how quickly developers are ready to get behind something without even being able to use it. Jai is similar in this regard. It's easy to make wild claims like "super fast compilation" or "can be translated from C++" when you don't have hundreds of users, all finding edge cases and wanting different things. Especially easy when you haven't released anything so everybody is projecting their favourite features onto the language.

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago

> I hope that you publish your work so that we may properly critique it. I don't know about this author, but for me, this would emphatically not be a motivating reason to publish my work. I might publish work so that someone could get some use out of it, or to show off my brilliance. But if all you're going to do is critique it (no doubt with all the familiarity born of five minutes of looking at the tutorial), then I'd just as soon you never see it. >Here is another language designer who is not me saying "closed languages die" (https://blog.golang.org/open-source https://blog.golang.org/open-source). I don't think the person you're quoting would advocate that languages must start out as open source. Go sure didn't. It was developed closed source within Google for two years before it was even announced.

doesnt_know 8y ago
I guess it depends on how the critique is delivered. I would unironically love it if an expert level in [repo language] would come along and critique my open source code. If they were an arrogant shit-head then I'd probably just block them, regardless of the technical merit of what they wrote.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  Sure. But an AC on HackerNews? Not so much.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    casual criticisms on hackernews are still more valuable for drawing attention to your project than in depth comment chains from renowned experts on [repository manager of choice].especially since those comment chains are undiscoverable unless you're already interested in the project(or the chain gets linked on hackernews) plus this may just be me as a non (designing a tool language for a project) dunce speaking but reading a critique of a language/framework that i haven't thought of makes me want to try out the language and see how that shortcoming affects the way i work. it's the reason i tried out Go and Elm and Vue.js

wilg 8y ago

It's not necessary for it to be a general purpose programming language, though. I think it is kind of neat to have a very specific, personal language that fits your mental model. On a larger team, probably not what you want, but there are other languages that are optimized for that. Basically you're right if the creator wants a widely-adopted general-purpose language. But there's other valid approaches I think.

amedvednikov 8y ago

Like it says on the website, the language will be open-sourced later in 2019.

ww520 8y ago

> Closed languages wither and die, and yours seems well onto that path. This is unnecessary harsh. The author has already said it will be open sourced later. I can understand the reasons to not open source now. Managing an open source project is no small work. Second, notwithstanding V's slim feature set, it's already more successful than 99% of language design attempts out there in that it ships. It certainly succeeds in letting the author to build his other projects faster and easier. It fulfills the author's own needs. I'm sure Perl and Python started that way.

kkarakk 8y ago
look at the authors comments in this thread, he's been known to miss deadlines before. open sourcing is probably gonna be really really delayed
- adamrezich 8y ago
  jeez man is any of that really necessary
- warent 8y ago
  This is engineering we're talking about. Deadlines and time estimations are a hard problem.
- ww520 8y ago
  This is his personal project. He really does not owe anyone anything, deadline or no deadline. Open source "users" have been getting really entitled these days.
- omeid2 8y ago
  As per contractual obligation of the author you can withhold pay and demand damages... oh wait.

dom96 8y ago

> It is all too common in PLT/PLD for somebody to come in with bold claims, outrageous mockups, and zero toolchain This. It's crazy to me how quickly developers are ready to get behind something without even being able to use it. Jai is similar in this regard. It's easy to make wild claims like "super fast compilation" or "can be translated from C++" when you don't have hundreds of users, all finding edge cases and wanting different things. Especially easy when you haven't released anything so everybody is projecting their favourite features onto the language.