Comment by crazywulf
3 years ago
I don't think it is fair to criticize the language like that without having "0.2 ALPHA" in the title of the ycombinator title and the article. In fact the hole article does not contain the word "alpha" or explaining the state once. It reads like that the language is expected to be ready and that all features need to work now, but they don't.
"At this time, I would not recommend spending time on V. I would also be very cautious when taking claims made by the authors at face value."
Also this point. Why does he recommend people to avoid the language. These people need contributors which help them to improve their language. It is open source. Maybe it is because I'm not native, maybe you are right.
I'm also curious if the author even tried to interact with the community/developers to get his examples to work. I'm not that good of a developer to rate the things he is claiming, so I don't know.
Hopefully he created some bugs on github so the developers have at least the chance to fix the issues he is talking about.
I don't really care that they don't write "unfinished alpha" in big letters (although it would be nice if they did).
I care that they claim it has "no undefined behaviour", "as fast as C", "has generics", when these things are simply not true.
To use Ante as an example again, they literally have a checklist in the README, listing what is and isn't implemented yet.
> Why does he recommend people to avoid the language. These people need contributors which help them to improve their language. It is open source.
This is why the "critic" can also be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as another attack. It's one thing if this was a blog evaluating the claims of multiple programming languages, but it being a very specific and dedicated critic of V, looks strange.
To include it uses the term "we" a lot in the summary, as if it was a collaboration effort by a group of programmers directed at V. It is unknown who are the "we" being referred to.
"We’re able to create a null pointer (V reference) with no compiler errors or warnings."
"We weren’t able to shadow local variables."
If the evaluation was in the spirit of improving the language (as it is still alpha) or pointing out things that need to be addressed, then one would expect it to be presented as various issues or bugs on V's GitHub. There would not be any blindsiding or surprise, but an exchange between the evaluator(s) and V's developers and contributors.
Parts of the evaluation and summary are debatably subjective. The categories of purity, sum types, generics, speed, and compiling are among them. So getting direct feedback from the developers and contributors of V would have been much more fair and helpful.
> I'm also curious if the author even tried to interact with the community > Hopefully he created some bugs on github
He didn't.