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Slightly off-topic but this whole thing made me curious. I keep seeing V being "attacked" by various people with these kind of blogposts (or even HN accounts d

Slightly off-topic but this whole thing made me curious. I keep seeing V being "attacked" by various people with these kind of blogposts (or even HN accounts dedicated to criticizing V), with broad range of claims or counter-claims to what V wants to achieve. While this is maybe not completely absent when other new languages comes up (like Golang or Rust), it feels like V really brings out the people to come up with ways of criticizing it. Do you have any ideas about why or how come? Have you noticed anything in particular that makes people want to (almost) aggressively "prove" V to be wrong? Basically, do you have any guesses to why V seems to have more "enemies" out there, compared to lets say Rust or Go?

colejohnson66 4y ago
IMO, it's pretty simple. At the beginning, V was making huge claims that turned out to be false or misleading. The developer clarified that many of those features were actually goals. Fair enough. There's also the whole issue with blocking people who criticized the language (eg. Xe) because V was being "attacked" as if there's some conspiracy to destroy V. The claims may be outdated, but the response by the developers put many people off. V has made huge strides since then, but people are very resentful.
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  There actually is such a conspiracy. People who wrote these articles literally wrote they wanted V to die. I'll make a detailed post about this next week.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    While wishing V would die is extreme, many people are just resentful about how V treated criticism in the beginning. Not to mention that a conspiracy requires a coordinated effort. It's a lot more likely that blog writers are upset about something and decide to go on rants about other minutiae they find instead of submitting GitHub issues.
    - amedvednikov 4y ago
      There are coordinated efforts on discords to brigade such threads, there are entire new accounts created just to reply to each of my comments negatively (luckily just today HN banned such an account), this very post about V 0.3 was mass flagged 3 times and removed from the front page 3 times, there are articles that take a simple bug fixed by a 3 line commit, and make a huge deal out of it spending a month writing an attacking post. Who would spend a month to write an article about a type checker bug?
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        Simply, V is very divisive. So, some people who peruse HN but don't have an account will see a V post, and make an account just to comment. Humans are just irrational.
        amedvednikov 4y ago
        I don't creating an account and monitoring my comments and replying to them with attacks and trolling for 3 years is "just commenting".
        colejohnson66 4y ago
        There's definitely trolls; I wasn't trying to imply otherwise. There's always going to be people who think your project is stupid, and it'll only get worse as the project grows. I think the best solution is to just ignore them.
        amedvednikov 4y ago
        Luckily in this case the amount of trolling goes down as the project grows :) There are now V contributors who used to troll V back in the day.
        hunterb123 4y ago
        > Simply, V is very divisive. How is an open-source programming language divisive? Seems the people brigading are toxic and divisive, not the language or it's maintainers.
  - wokwokwok 4y ago
    You posted lower down asking to be called out for specific behaviour that people find objectionable. This. It’s complete nonsense that there is a conspiracy to kill v off. You know it. We know it. Saying it is just drama for the sake of drama. > And the issues discussed are questionable at best. Half the article is about a type checker bug, which was a 3 line fix. > Then false claims like being able to modify array.len. This. You’re just creating drama saying things like this. Just say: “The issues in that review have been fixed now, please have a look and submit bugs in the issue tracker if you find them”. If someone has a legitimate thing to say, and at the time they say it it’s valid… that’s fine. If was wrong at the time, then by all means call it out. …but here’s the good story about v: you fix bugs. A lot. Quickly. You build lots of stuff. It’s very impressive. Things aren’t always perfect; it’s v0.3 for goodness sake. It’s fine. Just a) don’t claim it’s perfect when it’s not, and b) just clearly point out when issues that have been raised are fixed.
    - amedvednikov 4y ago
      It's not nonsense, read my replies below and the upcoming blog post next week. It's on a scale I've never seen before.
      - wokwokwok 4y ago
        I’m really sorry you feel that way; I honestly respect the work you do and I’m convinced you’re not correct about this… but hey; you’re deeper into it than me. Maybe there is? I don’t know. …but, please also stop and read what I said. You asked for specific examples where your interactions are causing problems. this is it. Don’t post like this. You’re accusing people of attacking you, attacking other people (for example your comments on the author of Zig below). This is what causes people to have bad interactions with you.
        amedvednikov 4y ago
        So people calling me a fraud and a scammer are not attacking me?
  - jsnell 4y ago
    You made that claim a couple of weeks ago, somebody investigated your claim, it turned out that you were grossly distorting the actual comment when paraphrasing. And given you continued to be active on that thread, you're clearly aware of this. Why continue spreading the lie? At this point you can't even claim it was an honest mistake. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830750
    - amedvednikov 4y ago
      Is "I think it is something that should be ignored until it dies into obscurity" different from "I think it should die"?
      - jsnell 4y ago
        Yes, it is completely different, as explained in that comment. Glad we've sorted this out, I trust that you'll stop making this claim in the future.
        amedvednikov 4y ago
        Agree to disagree. An author saying that proves the bias and the attack angle.
        jsnell 4y ago
        It doesn't. But there's a more important point: you're paraphrasing somebody you clearly have a great deal of personal animosity toward, completely changing the meaning in the process, and with no indication that this is what's happening. You've continued doing that even when it's pointed out to you. There are two options I can see: - You genuinely are not fluent enough in the language to either understand the original statement, or to write a fair paraphrase, and are not willing to believe this mistake. - You know exactly what you're doing. That is, if you gave the actual quote, nobody would for a moment take it as a proof of your conspiracy claims. Neither of the above is acting in good faith. I'd ask again whether you'll stop lying about what Xe said, but at this point the answer feels pretty obvious...
- gompertz 4y ago
  It's great you're level headed on this. As an indirect measure, I've perused the Discords of competing languages and the vibe is a world apart in terms of maturity, age group, topics (bullying is very prevailing, talking politics rampant, excessive anime) - essentially unmoderated reflections of character. So it's no wonder that if that's the community forged behind the scenes (in those competing languages), that it's going to bleed out and become issues elsewhere - and V is one such topic that seems to be commonly targeted by those groups.
- Shadonototra 4y ago
  Zig's author also publicly attacked V There was a lot of jealousy when V was announced Looks like the ones who need to self-reflect is Zig, they still don't have a self hosted compiler, meanwhile V compiles itself in less than a second
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    Yeah he was the first to call me a scammer and claimed V had a dependency on glfw. He was really persistent with his attacks, even received a warning from dang. I found it really surprising, because before the release he wrote: > Wow, that's incredibly fast. Self-hosted in 2 weeks? Hot code reloading? This is everything I plan to do with Zig, but apparently done already. How did you do it so quickly?
    - williamstein 4y ago
      Can you provide a link for that quote? I want to read it in context, and my attempts searching the web only brings me back here and another place with this quote without a reference. Thanks!!
      - raphlinus 4y ago
        It's legit, here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086589 I'll also add, my personal reading of the quote has more than a note of "this sounds too good to be true." But that could well be a matter of interpretation.
        Shadonototra 4y ago
        it not that comment, there was some attacks after that https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418 https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418 I can't find the article where he mentions that it is a scam, i also remember people attacking the patreon backers This tweet seems to be an apology so i guess we can move on EDIT: there i found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351
the_duke 4y ago
You might want to look into the somewhat dodgy history of the language. The negativity is not surprising. Though you may just be asking rhetorically to probe for a response from the founder, in which case, never mind.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Though you may just be asking somewhat rhetorically to probe for a response from a supporter No, I was genuinely asking the question directly at the creator of the project, to understand their view of the contention they seem to be at the receiving end of. I know the history of the project, but it seems to me like most languages in their pre 1.0 make claims about what they would like the language to be, not what it currently is, but they still don't receive their criticism in such manner. Or maybe I'm just reading into it too much. Hence the question :)
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > most languages in their pre 1.0 make claims about what they would like the language to be, not what it currently is, but they still don't receive their criticism in such manner That's because those languages make those claims in future-tense rather than past tense; they explicitly state them as goals, rather than presenting them as if they're already implemented. For example, I wrote a tiny scripting language for Erlang/OTP apps called OTPCL, and I make it clear in the README which features are actually implemented (like the parser and interpreter) v. which ones are in progress (like the standard library) v. which ones haven't been started at all yet (like the compiler). Same deal with up-and-coming languages closer to V's use case, like Zig; there's a clear distinction between those three levels of completeness. V did not make that distinction originally; a large number of its radically ambitious goals were presented on the website as if they were already implemented, only to later be revealed to be "WIP" at best. A lot of people - including, at one point, Zig's creator - assumed malice here, figuring the disparity between the website v. the actual releases to be an attempt to swindle Patreon backers (I can't read the mind of V's author, but I would guess that it was more of a language/communication thing than anything outright malicious). In any case, that left a pretty negative first impression for a lot of folks, myself included - and while it seems V is making some progress, it's hard to get that bad taste out of my mouth and consider even trying it out when languages like Zig and Odin and Nim and Crystal seem to be a lot more transparent and realistic from the outset.
amedvednikov 4y ago
I have some guesses. I'll publish a big blog post about this. It will debunk all these "V is a scam" articles. Basically V appeared out of nowhere and got popular very fast. It took a lot of shortcuts: it was self hosted on release, GitHub started supporting it 1 month after the release, it had hot code reloading, fast compilation (v self is <1s [0]) and so on. People developing other languages and their communities didn't like it, and decided to attack it. There were 2 strategies: making completely false statements (like claiming that the V compiler has a dependency on glfw, so the no dependency claim is false, and claiming that V programs use libc, system's only official API, therefore again the no dependency claim is false) and nitpicking over bugs that are inevitable in a 0.1 language, and sometimes complaining that features explicitly marked as [wip] are not ready yet. One of the common questions I saw is "why release it if it's not ready". While that's the whole point of open source. I got lots of help from 500+ contributors and got to this point a lot faster. Then there was also a misunderstanding with the "preview" release one week before the source code was released, and many thought V was going to be closed source. Over this week unfinished features were not marked as [wip]. They were marked so after the open source release, and now there're no [wip] features on the website. Everything listed there is working in latest V. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > People developing other languages and their communities didn't like it, and decided to attack it. I honestly doubt this is the case. Aside from some cargo-culters (which are far from being a majority), most programming language enthusiasts are very welcoming to new languages and ideas they bring with them. I have never seen a "language war" happening this way. Personally, I admire the V's ambitions (if the autofree() ever reaches production-quality it would be a total triumph over Golang's garbage collection approach), but I dislike the unprofessional approach to the community (explained in many other comments - particularly false claims about language capabilities, deleting criticisms, unwillingness to admit shortcomings and making up excuses for each of them, etc.).
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
striking 4y ago
I think the highly aspirational nature of the claims about V upon its original launch are why it attracted so much scrutiny. It claimed to do a lot of things and didn't clearly separate things that might be delivered in the future from those that would be features present in the language today. And, judging by the review linked upthread, as of last month this has remained the case. For this reason, I'm not surprised that the scrutiny continues.
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  If you look at other posts in this thread, you'll see that this review is completely irrelevant since the bugs it complained about were fixed in several 3 line commits.
  - striking 4y ago
    I won't pretend to be up to date on your language and what is fixed or working, but if it was so easy to fix these bugs that were apparently so trivial, why weren't they fixed before announcing / releasing the features? Even just communicating that a feature isn't done yet and may need a little more time (e.g. a beta tag) would go a long way in rebuilding trust with people outside your community. Meanwhile, defensive reactions like those I see in and around this thread make me feel like I trust you less.
    - amedvednikov 4y ago
      I'm sorry but that makes completely no sense. "Why didn't you release software without any bugs?" That's not how the world works. And it's open source, where hundreds of contributors help you find and fix these bugs. That's the whole point.
      - striking 4y ago
        As I said in my previous reply, you're more than welcome to stick a beta tag on something that isn't ready for prime time yet. Take a look at Rust and their releases as an example of the ultimate in building a stable foundation that people trust. I'm not asking you to never ship a bug. I'm saying I don't trust you or your language and giving you an example of how you might regain my trust. Feel free to ignore my advice, but if your goal is to encourage more people to use your language instead of encouraging more people to fight you, maybe you could at least give the impression that you were willing to hear someone out instead of telling them their opinion doesn't make any sense at all.
bragr 4y ago
V has "enemies" because that's how they respond to people giving them constructive criticism and questioning their claims. Most authors would relish of thorough technical analysis of where their issues where so they could improve their new language and compiler, but not V it seems. They mostly seem to deflect with denial or claims the issues were 'nothingburgers', but if that's the case, it should be trivial to offer a rebuttal in the form of a blog post, but instead we get ad hominems and conspiracy theories.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  The "nothingburger" you quoted is a single word you took from a reply chain in which amedvednikov explained the 800 byte "memory leak" was actually just GC overhead and expected. So it wasn't a memory leak, it is GC overhead, hence it being labeled as a "nothingburger". What specifically do you feel hasn't been resolved or addressed properly?
  - bragr 4y ago
    >What specifically do you feel hasn't been resolved or addressed properly? The author responding constructively to criticism. The bugs may be fixed, but if the author can't calmly engage and link to the fixed commit, or give evidence that, for example, everything compiled with GCC leaks those 800 bytes, well that's a major red flag about the project management of V.
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  Completely not true. We welcome criticism and feedback, we even have a topic with 800 messages called "What don't you like about V / what would you like to be changed?" https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 Wishing V to die and making false accusations is not "constructive criticism". There will be a blog post next week.
  - mihaigalos 4y ago
    The community isn't too friendly, I'm sorry. In the cited thread, I've deleted my contribution because of the tone of the discussion (passive-agressive know-it-alls with smirk emojis): https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610#discussioncomment-2243399 https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610#discussioncommen... Is this how you welcome people to the community? I enjoy V and contributed several PRs which got merged, but there's definitely an attitude problem there. I gave up contributions because of it.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Should the null hypothesis be that all languages deserve equal praise & blame and thus equal amounts of negative & positive critique? Maybe this language deserves more criticism. Or people are biased against it. Could be either explanation, or something else. But there ain’t just one single possibility.
wb13579 4y ago
It's because V made impossible promises, and used those to get donations. For example from wayback machine http://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/docs#memory http://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/d...: "(Work in progress) There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free." When people called him out for this saying that this was impossible he doubled down on it and said that it's fine to say things like that because of the "work in progress", as if it was coming. It turns out, it was impossible. V eventually had to add reference counting. The worst part is that he used lies like this to get thousands of dollars from Patreon sponsors. It seems like he's trying to clean up his act, but he's still making some dubious claims. He claims to have invented an "innovative and flexible memory management" reference counting algorithm that removes 80-90% of overhead. But there's no way to do that with mutable data, as far as i know. And sure enough, it doesn't work, users are still told to use the garbage collection option. If that turns out to be true, I might change my mind, but I fully expect that it's a false promise too.
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  It does work, and there's a 1.5 year old working demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM 0 GC is used. None of the people who ever donated or are still donating felt they were being scammed. They often write about this here on HN.
  - wb13579 4y ago
    A demo, sure. But answer us this: does autofree ever crash, and does autofree ever leak?
    - amedvednikov 4y ago
      A 0.3 language feature that is marked as "not ready for production" on the website have bugs. How unexpected.
Tozen 4y ago
> Basically, do you have any guesses to why V seems to have more "enemies" out there, compared to lets say Rust or Go? You have to keep in mind that V is an up and coming language, that is an alternative to Go, and somewhat to Rust. V is in the categories of C and Go alternatives. There are many other competing languages in V's categories, such as Zig, Odin, Nim, etc... Not too hard to see how "enemies" and rivals can "pop out of the woodwork" to take shots, the more popular that V becomes or the more they might feel that V is a threat to their interests. As for Go and Rust, they are backed by major companies, where "enemies" of their language will simply not get any or little media "airtime" nor enough traction to establish a negative public narrative that can stick. You can attempt to say something negative about them, but will be ignored or drowned out in various ways.
Tozen 4y ago
> ...it feels like V really brings out the people to come up with ways of criticizing it. V is an up and coming language in the categories of both C and Go alternatives. This means a wide range of competitors and "acolytes" who may "come out of the woodworks" to take a shot at a rival, at anytime. The more popular they believe V is becoming or the more threatened by it that they may feel, the more likely we are to see "shots fired". This is not to say that various criticisms are not or will not be valid. In fact, constructive criticism can be good and healthy. Among them, bringing bugs and issues to the attention of developers or having technical discussions with the language's community. But, the negative or non-constructive acts (attack blogs, downvoting, flagging, gaslighting, trolling, etc...) do shed light on some of the odd heavy-handed, sneaky, or aggressive vibes that many of us can see. It demonstrates the intentions of bad actors or those acting in bad faith. > ...absent when other new languages comes up (like Golang or Rust)... Golang and Rust are backed by major companies. They do have plenty of "enemies" and competitors taking shots at them, but they aren't given the media "airtime" for their negative narratives to stick and their attempts get drowned out by the size of the language's userbase or amount of "infomercials". Various other newer languages simply lack the popularity, userbase, or sponsors for most to even take notice or care. So they are simply not talked about.

colejohnson66 4y ago

IMO, it's pretty simple. At the beginning, V was making huge claims that turned out to be false or misleading. The developer clarified that many of those features were actually goals. Fair enough. There's also the whole issue with blocking people who criticized the language (eg. Xe) because V was being "attacked" as if there's some conspiracy to destroy V. The claims may be outdated, but the response by the developers put many people off. V has made huge strides since then, but people are very resentful.

amedvednikov 4y ago
There actually is such a conspiracy. People who wrote these articles literally wrote they wanted V to die. I'll make a detailed post about this next week.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  While wishing V would die is extreme, many people are just resentful about how V treated criticism in the beginning. Not to mention that a conspiracy requires a coordinated effort. It's a lot more likely that blog writers are upset about something and decide to go on rants about other minutiae they find instead of submitting GitHub issues.
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    There are coordinated efforts on discords to brigade such threads, there are entire new accounts created just to reply to each of my comments negatively (luckily just today HN banned such an account), this very post about V 0.3 was mass flagged 3 times and removed from the front page 3 times, there are articles that take a simple bug fixed by a 3 line commit, and make a huge deal out of it spending a month writing an attacking post. Who would spend a month to write an article about a type checker bug?
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      Simply, V is very divisive. So, some people who peruse HN but don't have an account will see a V post, and make an account just to comment. Humans are just irrational.
      - amedvednikov 4y ago
        I don't creating an account and monitoring my comments and replying to them with attacks and trolling for 3 years is "just commenting".
        colejohnson66 4y ago
        There's definitely trolls; I wasn't trying to imply otherwise. There's always going to be people who think your project is stupid, and it'll only get worse as the project grows. I think the best solution is to just ignore them.
        amedvednikov 4y ago
        Luckily in this case the amount of trolling goes down as the project grows :) There are now V contributors who used to troll V back in the day.
      - hunterb123 4y ago
        > Simply, V is very divisive. How is an open-source programming language divisive? Seems the people brigading are toxic and divisive, not the language or it's maintainers.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  You posted lower down asking to be called out for specific behaviour that people find objectionable. This. It’s complete nonsense that there is a conspiracy to kill v off. You know it. We know it. Saying it is just drama for the sake of drama. > And the issues discussed are questionable at best. Half the article is about a type checker bug, which was a 3 line fix. > Then false claims like being able to modify array.len. This. You’re just creating drama saying things like this. Just say: “The issues in that review have been fixed now, please have a look and submit bugs in the issue tracker if you find them”. If someone has a legitimate thing to say, and at the time they say it it’s valid… that’s fine. If was wrong at the time, then by all means call it out. …but here’s the good story about v: you fix bugs. A lot. Quickly. You build lots of stuff. It’s very impressive. Things aren’t always perfect; it’s v0.3 for goodness sake. It’s fine. Just a) don’t claim it’s perfect when it’s not, and b) just clearly point out when issues that have been raised are fixed.
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    It's not nonsense, read my replies below and the upcoming blog post next week. It's on a scale I've never seen before.
    - wokwokwok 4y ago
      I’m really sorry you feel that way; I honestly respect the work you do and I’m convinced you’re not correct about this… but hey; you’re deeper into it than me. Maybe there is? I don’t know. …but, please also stop and read what I said. You asked for specific examples where your interactions are causing problems. this is it. Don’t post like this. You’re accusing people of attacking you, attacking other people (for example your comments on the author of Zig below). This is what causes people to have bad interactions with you.
      - amedvednikov 4y ago
        So people calling me a fraud and a scammer are not attacking me?
- jsnell 4y ago
  You made that claim a couple of weeks ago, somebody investigated your claim, it turned out that you were grossly distorting the actual comment when paraphrasing. And given you continued to be active on that thread, you're clearly aware of this. Why continue spreading the lie? At this point you can't even claim it was an honest mistake. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830750
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    Is "I think it is something that should be ignored until it dies into obscurity" different from "I think it should die"?
    - jsnell 4y ago
      Yes, it is completely different, as explained in that comment. Glad we've sorted this out, I trust that you'll stop making this claim in the future.
      - amedvednikov 4y ago
        Agree to disagree. An author saying that proves the bias and the attack angle.
        jsnell 4y ago
        It doesn't. But there's a more important point: you're paraphrasing somebody you clearly have a great deal of personal animosity toward, completely changing the meaning in the process, and with no indication that this is what's happening. You've continued doing that even when it's pointed out to you. There are two options I can see: - You genuinely are not fluent enough in the language to either understand the original statement, or to write a fair paraphrase, and are not willing to believe this mistake. - You know exactly what you're doing. That is, if you gave the actual quote, nobody would for a moment take it as a proof of your conspiracy claims. Neither of the above is acting in good faith. I'd ask again whether you'll stop lying about what Xe said, but at this point the answer feels pretty obvious...
gompertz 4y ago
It's great you're level headed on this. As an indirect measure, I've perused the Discords of competing languages and the vibe is a world apart in terms of maturity, age group, topics (bullying is very prevailing, talking politics rampant, excessive anime) - essentially unmoderated reflections of character. So it's no wonder that if that's the community forged behind the scenes (in those competing languages), that it's going to bleed out and become issues elsewhere - and V is one such topic that seems to be commonly targeted by those groups.
Shadonototra 4y ago
Zig's author also publicly attacked V There was a lot of jealousy when V was announced Looks like the ones who need to self-reflect is Zig, they still don't have a self hosted compiler, meanwhile V compiles itself in less than a second
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  Yeah he was the first to call me a scammer and claimed V had a dependency on glfw. He was really persistent with his attacks, even received a warning from dang. I found it really surprising, because before the release he wrote: > Wow, that's incredibly fast. Self-hosted in 2 weeks? Hot code reloading? This is everything I plan to do with Zig, but apparently done already. How did you do it so quickly?
  - williamstein 4y ago
    Can you provide a link for that quote? I want to read it in context, and my attempts searching the web only brings me back here and another place with this quote without a reference. Thanks!!
    - raphlinus 4y ago
      It's legit, here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086589 I'll also add, my personal reading of the quote has more than a note of "this sounds too good to be true." But that could well be a matter of interpretation.
      - Shadonototra 4y ago
        it not that comment, there was some attacks after that https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418 https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418 I can't find the article where he mentions that it is a scam, i also remember people attacking the patreon backers This tweet seems to be an apology so i guess we can move on EDIT: there i found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351

the_duke 4y ago

You might want to look into the somewhat dodgy history of the language. The negativity is not surprising. Though you may just be asking rhetorically to probe for a response from the founder, in which case, never mind.

capableweb 4y ago
> Though you may just be asking somewhat rhetorically to probe for a response from a supporter No, I was genuinely asking the question directly at the creator of the project, to understand their view of the contention they seem to be at the receiving end of. I know the history of the project, but it seems to me like most languages in their pre 1.0 make claims about what they would like the language to be, not what it currently is, but they still don't receive their criticism in such manner. Or maybe I'm just reading into it too much. Hence the question :)
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > most languages in their pre 1.0 make claims about what they would like the language to be, not what it currently is, but they still don't receive their criticism in such manner That's because those languages make those claims in future-tense rather than past tense; they explicitly state them as goals, rather than presenting them as if they're already implemented. For example, I wrote a tiny scripting language for Erlang/OTP apps called OTPCL, and I make it clear in the README which features are actually implemented (like the parser and interpreter) v. which ones are in progress (like the standard library) v. which ones haven't been started at all yet (like the compiler). Same deal with up-and-coming languages closer to V's use case, like Zig; there's a clear distinction between those three levels of completeness. V did not make that distinction originally; a large number of its radically ambitious goals were presented on the website as if they were already implemented, only to later be revealed to be "WIP" at best. A lot of people - including, at one point, Zig's creator - assumed malice here, figuring the disparity between the website v. the actual releases to be an attempt to swindle Patreon backers (I can't read the mind of V's author, but I would guess that it was more of a language/communication thing than anything outright malicious). In any case, that left a pretty negative first impression for a lot of folks, myself included - and while it seems V is making some progress, it's hard to get that bad taste out of my mouth and consider even trying it out when languages like Zig and Odin and Nim and Crystal seem to be a lot more transparent and realistic from the outset.

amedvednikov 4y ago

I have some guesses. I'll publish a big blog post about this. It will debunk all these "V is a scam" articles. Basically V appeared out of nowhere and got popular very fast. It took a lot of shortcuts: it was self hosted on release, GitHub started supporting it 1 month after the release, it had hot code reloading, fast compilation (v self is <1s [0]) and so on. People developing other languages and their communities didn't like it, and decided to attack it. There were 2 strategies: making completely false statements (like claiming that the V compiler has a dependency on glfw, so the no dependency claim is false, and claiming that V programs use libc, system's only official API, therefore again the no dependency claim is false) and nitpicking over bugs that are inevitable in a 0.1 language, and sometimes complaining that features explicitly marked as [wip] are not ready yet. One of the common questions I saw is "why release it if it's not ready". While that's the whole point of open source. I got lots of help from 500+ contributors and got to this point a lot faster. Then there was also a misunderstanding with the "preview" release one week before the source code was released, and many thought V was going to be closed source. Over this week unfinished features were not marked as [wip]. They were marked so after the open source release, and now there're no [wip] features on the website. Everything listed there is working in latest V. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc

bheadmaster 4y ago
> People developing other languages and their communities didn't like it, and decided to attack it. I honestly doubt this is the case. Aside from some cargo-culters (which are far from being a majority), most programming language enthusiasts are very welcoming to new languages and ideas they bring with them. I have never seen a "language war" happening this way. Personally, I admire the V's ambitions (if the autofree() ever reaches production-quality it would be a total triumph over Golang's garbage collection approach), but I dislike the unprofessional approach to the community (explained in many other comments - particularly false claims about language capabilities, deleting criticisms, unwillingness to admit shortcomings and making up excuses for each of them, etc.).
- amedvednikov 4y ago

striking 4y ago

I think the highly aspirational nature of the claims about V upon its original launch are why it attracted so much scrutiny. It claimed to do a lot of things and didn't clearly separate things that might be delivered in the future from those that would be features present in the language today. And, judging by the review linked upthread, as of last month this has remained the case. For this reason, I'm not surprised that the scrutiny continues.

amedvednikov 4y ago
If you look at other posts in this thread, you'll see that this review is completely irrelevant since the bugs it complained about were fixed in several 3 line commits.
- striking 4y ago
  I won't pretend to be up to date on your language and what is fixed or working, but if it was so easy to fix these bugs that were apparently so trivial, why weren't they fixed before announcing / releasing the features? Even just communicating that a feature isn't done yet and may need a little more time (e.g. a beta tag) would go a long way in rebuilding trust with people outside your community. Meanwhile, defensive reactions like those I see in and around this thread make me feel like I trust you less.
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    I'm sorry but that makes completely no sense. "Why didn't you release software without any bugs?" That's not how the world works. And it's open source, where hundreds of contributors help you find and fix these bugs. That's the whole point.
    - striking 4y ago
      As I said in my previous reply, you're more than welcome to stick a beta tag on something that isn't ready for prime time yet. Take a look at Rust and their releases as an example of the ultimate in building a stable foundation that people trust. I'm not asking you to never ship a bug. I'm saying I don't trust you or your language and giving you an example of how you might regain my trust. Feel free to ignore my advice, but if your goal is to encourage more people to use your language instead of encouraging more people to fight you, maybe you could at least give the impression that you were willing to hear someone out instead of telling them their opinion doesn't make any sense at all.

bragr 4y ago

V has "enemies" because that's how they respond to people giving them constructive criticism and questioning their claims. Most authors would relish of thorough technical analysis of where their issues where so they could improve their new language and compiler, but not V it seems. They mostly seem to deflect with denial or claims the issues were 'nothingburgers', but if that's the case, it should be trivial to offer a rebuttal in the form of a blog post, but instead we get ad hominems and conspiracy theories.

hunterb123 4y ago
The "nothingburger" you quoted is a single word you took from a reply chain in which amedvednikov explained the 800 byte "memory leak" was actually just GC overhead and expected. So it wasn't a memory leak, it is GC overhead, hence it being labeled as a "nothingburger". What specifically do you feel hasn't been resolved or addressed properly?
- bragr 4y ago
  >What specifically do you feel hasn't been resolved or addressed properly? The author responding constructively to criticism. The bugs may be fixed, but if the author can't calmly engage and link to the fixed commit, or give evidence that, for example, everything compiled with GCC leaks those 800 bytes, well that's a major red flag about the project management of V.
amedvednikov 4y ago
Completely not true. We welcome criticism and feedback, we even have a topic with 800 messages called "What don't you like about V / what would you like to be changed?" https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 Wishing V to die and making false accusations is not "constructive criticism". There will be a blog post next week.
- mihaigalos 4y ago
  The community isn't too friendly, I'm sorry. In the cited thread, I've deleted my contribution because of the tone of the discussion (passive-agressive know-it-alls with smirk emojis): https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610#discussioncomment-2243399 https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610#discussioncommen... Is this how you welcome people to the community? I enjoy V and contributed several PRs which got merged, but there's definitely an attitude problem there. I gave up contributions because of it.

avgcorrection 4y ago

Should the null hypothesis be that all languages deserve equal praise & blame and thus equal amounts of negative & positive critique? Maybe this language deserves more criticism. Or people are biased against it. Could be either explanation, or something else. But there ain’t just one single possibility.

wb13579 4y ago

It's because V made impossible promises, and used those to get donations. For example from wayback machine http://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/docs#memory http://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/d...: "(Work in progress) There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free." When people called him out for this saying that this was impossible he doubled down on it and said that it's fine to say things like that because of the "work in progress", as if it was coming. It turns out, it was impossible. V eventually had to add reference counting. The worst part is that he used lies like this to get thousands of dollars from Patreon sponsors. It seems like he's trying to clean up his act, but he's still making some dubious claims. He claims to have invented an "innovative and flexible memory management" reference counting algorithm that removes 80-90% of overhead. But there's no way to do that with mutable data, as far as i know. And sure enough, it doesn't work, users are still told to use the garbage collection option. If that turns out to be true, I might change my mind, but I fully expect that it's a false promise too.

amedvednikov 4y ago
It does work, and there's a 1.5 year old working demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM 0 GC is used. None of the people who ever donated or are still donating felt they were being scammed. They often write about this here on HN.
- wb13579 4y ago
  A demo, sure. But answer us this: does autofree ever crash, and does autofree ever leak?
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    A 0.3 language feature that is marked as "not ready for production" on the website have bugs. How unexpected.

Tozen 4y ago

> Basically, do you have any guesses to why V seems to have more "enemies" out there, compared to lets say Rust or Go? You have to keep in mind that V is an up and coming language, that is an alternative to Go, and somewhat to Rust. V is in the categories of C and Go alternatives. There are many other competing languages in V's categories, such as Zig, Odin, Nim, etc... Not too hard to see how "enemies" and rivals can "pop out of the woodwork" to take shots, the more popular that V becomes or the more they might feel that V is a threat to their interests. As for Go and Rust, they are backed by major companies, where "enemies" of their language will simply not get any or little media "airtime" nor enough traction to establish a negative public narrative that can stick. You can attempt to say something negative about them, but will be ignored or drowned out in various ways.

Tozen 4y ago

> ...it feels like V really brings out the people to come up with ways of criticizing it. V is an up and coming language in the categories of both C and Go alternatives. This means a wide range of competitors and "acolytes" who may "come out of the woodworks" to take a shot at a rival, at anytime. The more popular they believe V is becoming or the more threatened by it that they may feel, the more likely we are to see "shots fired". This is not to say that various criticisms are not or will not be valid. In fact, constructive criticism can be good and healthy. Among them, bringing bugs and issues to the attention of developers or having technical discussions with the language's community. But, the negative or non-constructive acts (attack blogs, downvoting, flagging, gaslighting, trolling, etc...) do shed light on some of the odd heavy-handed, sneaky, or aggressive vibes that many of us can see. It demonstrates the intentions of bad actors or those acting in bad faith. > ...absent when other new languages comes up (like Golang or Rust)... Golang and Rust are backed by major companies. They do have plenty of "enemies" and competitors taking shots at them, but they aren't given the media "airtime" for their negative narratives to stick and their attempts get drowned out by the size of the language's userbase or amount of "infomercials". Various other newer languages simply lack the popularity, userbase, or sponsors for most to even take notice or care. So they are simply not talked about.