4 ms·

os.system2('curl -s -L -o "$out" "$url"') is not an acceptable thing to do.

amedvednikov 7y ago
Which was fixed almost right away. In fact there's no libcurl dependency at all right now. OpenSSL/SChannel are used directly. Nitpicking one liners like that from a huge one man project that has just been released is ridiculous. Luckily the language continues to grow at a rapid pace despite all clickbait vaporware articles.
- dmix 7y ago
  People love tearing down other people and their things on the internet. I never understood that mentality without having some personal connection to the topic or a deep understanding of the topic. I see the [wip] progress labels all over the site now, I guess some people need it to be explicitly labeled before the give a full break down of what you've made!
  - amedvednikov 7y ago
    > People love tearing down other people and their things on the internet. Indeed. These [wip] labels were there before this vaporware article :)
    - dinglejungle 7y ago
      > These [wip] labels were there before this vaporware article :) Only a day or two at most according to archive.org. No WIP labels on 2019-06-21 (the closest snapshot available before the article was published)[1]. WIP labels exist on 2019-06-24 (the closest snapshot to the articles date)[2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/
      - amedvednikov 7y ago
        Which still means that the article was released after the WIP tags were added, and was complaining that WIP features don't work.
    - chubs 7y ago
      Here's one thing my pastor (who was somewhat high-profile and had his fair share of 'haters') said a few times: You simply have to outlast your critics. Maybe all you need to do is keep at it, and ship an awesome v1 when ready. Best of luck :)
  - hybrids 7y ago
    I don't really get what point you're trying to make here. Yes, people should not be mean-spirited, but the opposite (i.e. the internet should be a hugbox) is just contrarian; and, for the record, I don't think the article is very mean-spirited at all when you take in consideration what percisely it was responding to. A lot of the criticism of V takes aim at how the language was advertised which strikes a lot of people as rightfully annoying in the "C++ killer" space, something that a lot of people have put a lot of hard work already into which should not be entirely out of hand (this space is becoming very crowded for attention). If V's code remained the same at launch with its author choosing to be a little more conservative and thoughtful with its announcement, this type of response would not have happened. Its author did not make the status of the language entirely clear. When Odin came out a year ago, Lobster half a year ago, Zig three years ago, or Mun a month ago (of whom its authors were considerably modest: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822), sure, they were critiqued, but they were not met with the specific kind of response V had for a reason. Keep in mind languages (that don't aim to be toys) should rightfully be subject to a greater degree of criticism as their goals are primarily to upend a domain in such a way that if they fail, it renders the efforts of a lot of other people writing code in that language as something for naught. People take gambles when they adopt new technologies in general, but languages (maybe operating systems by extension) are of a significantly different scope.
    - amedvednikov 7y ago
      So what's the actual criticism? So far it's only been things like "it has a freetype dependecy", "it has no AST, so json decoding is not possible", "it's a joke language, no way V is written in V" etc.
      - hybrids 7y ago
        Claims to "being able to now compile itself in 0.09 seconds" whilst pushing the need for an AST to the side represents a serious problem in the language's general direction (and I mean general in an aggregated way). Of course shelling-out to curl for your download function is a bodge to be fixed, but the language's issues are not merely one specific problem. The author's misrepresentation of the language, of course, hangs overhead upon all of this. https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35 https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35 I don't want to discount all of the work people have put into V. It is clear that they have made considerable progress since earlier this year and I commend them for pushing the language into a more usable state. Nevertheless, I still retain a considerable degree of skepticism.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    > People love tearing down other people and their things on the internet. Not even on the internet. Have an idea, people reflexively shit on it. When I see an idea unless it's utterly broken I try to figure out how you make it work. Not pat oneself on the back for coming up with some trite reason why it won't.
  - delian66 7y ago
    Only some people love to do that. Many others hate it when it happens.
kstenerud 7y ago
Putting temporary code in a WIP project is perfectly acceptable. Ripping on a WIP project is not an acceptable thing to do. Even the title "V is for Vaporware" is just oozing bias and condescension, and makes me lose any respect for the author.
- egeozcan 7y ago
  I mean you can get all negative and skeptic, and I would respect that. Some developers, including me, have a negative attitude towards (or even spooked by) marketing, and that's okay. There are many others who like it. The name-calling is what makes me uneasy.
- didibus 7y ago
  The original issue people had involved money. Money always taints a project. The complaints were that all the claims were WIPs, and none of them were implemented and working to a level that can be relied on and used. Yet the project had already gotten more donations than other similar projects that are way further into their development. Then, a lot of language programmers with credentials behind them came out and basically tried to warn people that going from WIP to Production with all those claimed features is very hard and the chances of failure for V are high. That there was a reason no language currently existed that had all those claimed features together. Doing so is very challenging. So at that point, the outrage was that some people are potentially being fooled into donating for something that will never meet its claims, a.k.a, Vaporware. Or that it's unfair to donate to V, where it could be similarly donated to other languages that's been at it for longer which could make it all happen sooner. Now, here's my take. I think the criticism is fair. I think the odds of V being a better language than all the other existing ones once it's ready and done are slim. But, I also think that it having had better marketing, bold claims, and clear ambitions, might be the only chance it has at making it. The funding it's getting, the support from other contributors that showed up after all the marketing push, that could pay off. Look at the commit history pre/post all the marketing. I've never seen an open source project that's so early in development having so many contributors beyond the ones that are made by a company hiring a team. Basically, I feel tech people underestimate the value of marketing and a good sales man. These things are needed to build a good product as well. You can't build anything without resources. Steve Jobs couldn't have built the iPhone from a technical angle, but the engineers couldn't have built the iPhone without Steve Jobs enabling its focused development. All the luck to V, and all the other languages to be honest. I don't care how it happens, through overblown marketing, clickbait articles, or through academic rhetoric, or from pure passion, or through someone working in a cave somewhere disconnected and coming out of it all of a sudden, etc. I just would like for it to happen.
lifthrasiir 7y ago
I don't think it is not an acceptable thing by itself (I did have other issues with it at the time V source code had released, but this one is not). For example, QuickJS `std` module does the same [1]. To be fair to QuickJS though, it documents that fact correctly and it has never claimed to work in non-Unixy platforms. [1] https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html#std-module https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html#std-module.

Which was fixed almost right away. In fact there's no libcurl dependency at all right now. OpenSSL/SChannel are used directly. Nitpicking one liners like that from a huge one man project that has just been released is ridiculous. Luckily the language continues to grow at a rapid pace despite all clickbait vaporware articles.

dmix 7y ago
People love tearing down other people and their things on the internet. I never understood that mentality without having some personal connection to the topic or a deep understanding of the topic. I see the [wip] progress labels all over the site now, I guess some people need it to be explicitly labeled before the give a full break down of what you've made!
- amedvednikov 7y ago
  > People love tearing down other people and their things on the internet. Indeed. These [wip] labels were there before this vaporware article :)
  - dinglejungle 7y ago
    > These [wip] labels were there before this vaporware article :) Only a day or two at most according to archive.org. No WIP labels on 2019-06-21 (the closest snapshot available before the article was published)[1]. WIP labels exist on 2019-06-24 (the closest snapshot to the articles date)[2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/
    - amedvednikov 7y ago
      Which still means that the article was released after the WIP tags were added, and was complaining that WIP features don't work.
  - chubs 7y ago
    Here's one thing my pastor (who was somewhat high-profile and had his fair share of 'haters') said a few times: You simply have to outlast your critics. Maybe all you need to do is keep at it, and ship an awesome v1 when ready. Best of luck :)
- hybrids 7y ago
  I don't really get what point you're trying to make here. Yes, people should not be mean-spirited, but the opposite (i.e. the internet should be a hugbox) is just contrarian; and, for the record, I don't think the article is very mean-spirited at all when you take in consideration what percisely it was responding to. A lot of the criticism of V takes aim at how the language was advertised which strikes a lot of people as rightfully annoying in the "C++ killer" space, something that a lot of people have put a lot of hard work already into which should not be entirely out of hand (this space is becoming very crowded for attention). If V's code remained the same at launch with its author choosing to be a little more conservative and thoughtful with its announcement, this type of response would not have happened. Its author did not make the status of the language entirely clear. When Odin came out a year ago, Lobster half a year ago, Zig three years ago, or Mun a month ago (of whom its authors were considerably modest: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822), sure, they were critiqued, but they were not met with the specific kind of response V had for a reason. Keep in mind languages (that don't aim to be toys) should rightfully be subject to a greater degree of criticism as their goals are primarily to upend a domain in such a way that if they fail, it renders the efforts of a lot of other people writing code in that language as something for naught. People take gambles when they adopt new technologies in general, but languages (maybe operating systems by extension) are of a significantly different scope.
  - amedvednikov 7y ago
    So what's the actual criticism? So far it's only been things like "it has a freetype dependecy", "it has no AST, so json decoding is not possible", "it's a joke language, no way V is written in V" etc.
    - hybrids 7y ago
      Claims to "being able to now compile itself in 0.09 seconds" whilst pushing the need for an AST to the side represents a serious problem in the language's general direction (and I mean general in an aggregated way). Of course shelling-out to curl for your download function is a bodge to be fixed, but the language's issues are not merely one specific problem. The author's misrepresentation of the language, of course, hangs overhead upon all of this. https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35 https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35 I don't want to discount all of the work people have put into V. It is clear that they have made considerable progress since earlier this year and I commend them for pushing the language into a more usable state. Nevertheless, I still retain a considerable degree of skepticism.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > People love tearing down other people and their things on the internet. Not even on the internet. Have an idea, people reflexively shit on it. When I see an idea unless it's utterly broken I try to figure out how you make it work. Not pat oneself on the back for coming up with some trite reason why it won't.
- delian66 7y ago
  Only some people love to do that. Many others hate it when it happens.

kstenerud 7y ago

Putting temporary code in a WIP project is perfectly acceptable. Ripping on a WIP project is not an acceptable thing to do. Even the title "V is for Vaporware" is just oozing bias and condescension, and makes me lose any respect for the author.

egeozcan 7y ago
I mean you can get all negative and skeptic, and I would respect that. Some developers, including me, have a negative attitude towards (or even spooked by) marketing, and that's okay. There are many others who like it. The name-calling is what makes me uneasy.
didibus 7y ago
The original issue people had involved money. Money always taints a project. The complaints were that all the claims were WIPs, and none of them were implemented and working to a level that can be relied on and used. Yet the project had already gotten more donations than other similar projects that are way further into their development. Then, a lot of language programmers with credentials behind them came out and basically tried to warn people that going from WIP to Production with all those claimed features is very hard and the chances of failure for V are high. That there was a reason no language currently existed that had all those claimed features together. Doing so is very challenging. So at that point, the outrage was that some people are potentially being fooled into donating for something that will never meet its claims, a.k.a, Vaporware. Or that it's unfair to donate to V, where it could be similarly donated to other languages that's been at it for longer which could make it all happen sooner. Now, here's my take. I think the criticism is fair. I think the odds of V being a better language than all the other existing ones once it's ready and done are slim. But, I also think that it having had better marketing, bold claims, and clear ambitions, might be the only chance it has at making it. The funding it's getting, the support from other contributors that showed up after all the marketing push, that could pay off. Look at the commit history pre/post all the marketing. I've never seen an open source project that's so early in development having so many contributors beyond the ones that are made by a company hiring a team. Basically, I feel tech people underestimate the value of marketing and a good sales man. These things are needed to build a good product as well. You can't build anything without resources. Steve Jobs couldn't have built the iPhone from a technical angle, but the engineers couldn't have built the iPhone without Steve Jobs enabling its focused development. All the luck to V, and all the other languages to be honest. I don't care how it happens, through overblown marketing, clickbait articles, or through academic rhetoric, or from pure passion, or through someone working in a cave somewhere disconnected and coming out of it all of a sudden, etc. I just would like for it to happen.

lifthrasiir 7y ago

I don't think it is not an acceptable thing by itself (I did have other issues with it at the time V source code had released, but this one is not). For example, QuickJS `std` module does the same [1]. To be fair to QuickJS though, it documents that fact correctly and it has never claimed to work in non-Unixy platforms. [1] https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html#std-module https://bellard.org/quickjs/quickjs.html#std-module.