Comment by Tozen
2 years ago
All open-source programming languages are allowed to get or ask for donations and have sponsors, not just the languages that one is a fan of.
It's also ethically wrong to engage in falsely labeling or making false accusations, such as "scam" or "vaporware". Particularly, when the actual intent or agenda is that such persons are detractors or competitors from rival languages.
Lastly, various financial supporters of the V language have even come on HN to tell and explain how proud they are of the language and the progress it has made. Despite detractors and competitors, V is still making fantastic progress, and that's great to see.
> All open-source programming languages are allowed to get or ask for donations and have sponsors, [...]
> Particularly, when the actual intent or agenda is that such persons are detractors or competitors from rival languages.
V was not open-sourced when the accusation was made, and there were probably two or three people qualifying your description of "rivals" (even after assuming bad intents). Stop diluting the context.
> Lastly, various financial supporters of the V language have even come on HN to tell and explain how proud they are of the language and the progress it has made.
This is not different from how many investors to failed crowdfunding campaigns would behave before the actual failure. They will either acknolwedge risks (but few actually evaluate them) or "answer" every criticism with non sequiturs. It is not really their fault, but still useless as an evidence.
> V was not open-sourced when the accusation was made
V has been open source since its public release on June 22, 2019.
On June 20, 2019 an early access build of the compiler was released.
The "early access" thing makes sense in closed-source projects but not much in F/OSS projects. Now I understand what you meant, but as I've said it was not technically open-sourced for two days and no one would be sure whether you are sincere or not.
This confusion should have been temporary and could have been easily resolved, but your reaction arguably made things worse. For example back then I actually asked you about the exact generic compilation strategy [1], and your answer was unnecessarily aggressive and content-free. It turns out that my later guess (to which you never replied) was right, i.e. the initial V compiler maintained a partial C code template that can be patched. If you had actually answered as such, people would have less reasons to disbelieve you because you have demonstrated a necessary understanding. This was also why other language developers were particularly harsh to you at the beginning.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231856
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