Comment by Tozen
2 years ago
V has the right to exist, have its supporters, and do things its own way. The creator and developers of V, from what I have seen, have responded well to actual constructive criticism. Their language has discussions opened at their GitHub, unlike those for various other languages. They even have a thread for what people don't like and want improved about the language[1], again, something many other languages don't have.
A lot of what was going on initially, was coming from obvious competitors and evangelists, to include being uncivil, inflammatory, and directly insulting. The initial "criticism" was not so much that, but false accusations of the language being a scam, vaporware, fraud, or didn't really exist. To include attacks and jealousy over donations, rising popularity, and having supporters. This was not any kind of "valid" criticism, that the creator or contributors of the language could reason about with instigators.
The "criticism" never died down, but rather V was open-sourced and established itself on GitHub. The initial series of false accusations could not stand nor could the support it was getting be stopped. So, the rhetoric and targets shifted to whatever could be found to go after on the newly released alpha version of the language and its new website. In that new mix of what was being thrown at it, there were indeed some very valid criticisms, as can be found with any new language and many sites.
Constructive and valid criticism, is not the same as insults, trolling, misinformation, rivalry, or false accusations. There is clearly a difference. It's disingenuous to pretend something from one group is the same as the other, or that the intent behind what is being done is not different.
A big reason this drama still exists on HN is your style of evangelism. You are not a good ambassador for this language, and if you care about it you should stop.
You’re not going to change my mind that the initial promises were outlandish unless you implement them (you haven’t yet in 4 years), and claiming today they weren’t (as Alex is) is literally the worst approach you could take to build trust in your language. People weren’t mad about V they were mad about the exaggerations, prevarications, shifting explanations, aggressive tone, and now gaslighting from the V author. And if you turn it back around on me yet again you’re proving my point.
[dead]
> The "criticism" never died down,
Well, that's because the reason behind the criticism was never really the language. It was the attitude of its author and proponents. Sadly, this very thread proves that that attitude has not changed [1] one bit, so it's no wonder the criticisms remain.
> The initial "criticism" was not so much that, but false accusations of the language being a scam, vaporware, fraud, or didn't really exist.
Backlash is to be expected whenever extraordinary claims get made with nothing to back them up. Apparently V is supposed to be able to translate entire C & C++ projects to V and run as fast as C, but with memory freed automatically by the compiler. Now, combine such impossible claims with the initial unavailability of the source code, asking for donations, refusing to elaborate on how exactly this would work, and the fact that none of is is true even today.
That's because none of the outrageous claims are possible. They weren't possible back when V was announced either and when the programming community immediately pointed it out, the response was the same as we've seen in every thread since then - gaslighting.
It's one thing to make hopeful and starry-eyed, but misguided claims, it's another to double down on them, deny any mistakes, and play a victim.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31793554