V Is for Vaporware | Hacker News Reader

V Is for Vaporware

christine.website

63 pointsxena33 comments

I don't understand these kinds of articles at all, maybe somebody can help me.

So the author has overhyped its creation. So what? Humans get attached to their creations and can't view them objectively. That's a documented psychological fact -- just look at your typical parent, their kids can do no wrong in their eyes.

I tried following V's story lately on HN and truthfully, I got very surprised by the ton of hate and insane nitpicking. I get it, things are promised and are not yet delivered. It's one guy. And he's creating a C language competitor. C has what, 40+ years of backing? I dare you to do better than him. I personally don't have the balls to even attempt such a thing. But at least I am not bashing the guy.

I actually applaud him for not being a typical introverted engineer and that he gets out of his way to address criticism here on HN -- not always constructively, granted, but I'm prety sure most of you cannot take that much flak and not snap. And he tries to make a semi-okay website.

V is not harmful to anyone in any way even if half the claims on its page are not true [yet]. Getting in $500 - $2000 of donations in a month for development of something like this is peanuts and does no harm to anybody, anywhere.

Are you aware there are dozens of Twitch "streamers" shaking cleavage on a webcam while failing at a videogame, raking in thousands of hard-earned $$$, and that this is happening every day for years now? Why don't you go piss at that?

> So the author has overhyped its creation. So what?

Either: "Someone got excited, took a closer look and wrote a blog post", or "someone got mildly annoyed by the overhyping, tried it out and wrote a blog post about it". It seems to be fairly factual criticism to me, comparing the marketing claims to actual experience.

And especially because getting a language going is such a big project I don't get why you'd state things that aren't there yet - everyone would expect an early version to not have all those things if there weren't claims to the opposite, so being honest about the state of things doesn't really hurt you. To the contrary, it avoids people being disappointed when they want to try something that's claimed as a feature and it isn't there. And some probably consider it unfair towards projects that are less bold in their claims.

I'm not sure what the "harmless" comments are about - the article doesn't mention anything about that (or the income) at all?

> I don't get why you'd state things that aren't there yet

I interpreted it as "things I want to eventually add", and I already conceded that the author has some false claims (as the blog post points out as well).

Think of it as a roadmap / mission statement. It gives you a good idea if you want to use it when it is eventually ready. A small bit of marketing.

> I'm not sure what the "harmless" comments are about - the article doesn't mention anything about that (or the income) at all?

Zig's author has said they have been discouraged to work on their tech since they allegedly work harder and deliver more yet get less donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230384 (which is a child of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351).

Several other people in this thread (and I think others if memory serves) have expressed displeasure that V's author collects donations.

That is toxic. People get donations for all sorts of stuff. Let them, and don't be bitter about it. The way the HN crowd seemed to latch onto V's author specifically was very peculiar for me to observe in the last several months.

I hadn't seen that thread you linked - ugly in both directions IMHO. I see why people have a problem with it, some of the comments are over the line IMHO, and it's still just someones small project, so I get why looser standards should apply. To me, the comments there are different than what I read from the article submitted here.

EDIT: large rewording, sorry!

(I see you edited out most of your comment. Still leaving some of mine in place.)

> I did not read the page as a roadmap...

I'll say again that I fail to understand what's so bad if somebody didn't say something is WIP and claimed it's ready. We're programmers and very far from helpless clueless non-technical users. We can download the thing, try it and see for ourselves.

I am asking: where's the actual, measurable, tangible harm in that?

Can't understand what's the big outrage about V. There have been multiple threads about it on HN lately and the amount of hate and bitterness by other HNers is comical and totally unexpected on this forum which I viewed in a higher regard until just recently.

EDIT: Additionally, a comment from `dang`, one of the moderators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393

Oops, I just had removed that section after reading the other thread a bit more.

To "where's the actual, measurable, tangible harm in that?": People's sense of what's fair or not doesn't necessarily match that perfectly. A single project being overhyped probably doesn't do much harm (although discouraging contributors to other projects, taking mindshare from them, ... probably is a minor form of harm, even if hard to quantify), but I think people dislike it because it distracts and it would be a problem if it became the norm. Again, my initial comment in this thread was without the context of other discussions and only based on the article.

Eh, maybe. We're a much smaller community and we self-correct quite well IMO. If people start claiming obvious non-truisms left and right we'll ignore them and their projects will never take off.

Thanks for the good discussion. ^_^

Yes, with the additional context I totally get where your original comment came from, and as I said in a comment to the creator here I hope this doesn't overshadow the work long-term.

side note: as a vaguely related comparison, Rust, despite all it's merits, still has some problems with being overhyped, not even by its creators, who at least from what I've been seeing are fairly careful about it, but by random fans, which causes friction in the wider community, because people don't like being promised unfullfilled things or being told to feel bad for what they're doing. I respect Rust, I don't like it's fans pretending everything would be better if I used it or comparing my daily work to war crimes because it involves C++, it's a factor I need to actively tune out because I know there is something behind the hype.

> We can download the thing, try it and see for ourselves.

You couldn't two days ago, and nothing was marked as WIP two days ago, either. Hopefully things can cool down now that it's available.

Maybe most of you forgot the previous articles. When V author was here, he and his original site promised all sorts of huge claims that teams of pro's had either failed to pull off or barely pulled off. Not just excited about future work: claimed he already had a lot done. He talked about a few things as work in progress that would be out in a few months as if he had most of it done. Later, after much debate, he said he was just getting started on a few of those. Bigger claims remained on the website.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086712

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403271

So, cadey on Lobste.rs was really excited about the V language hoping it was delivering on its claims. She usually submits good stuff, too. She submitted his repo when it went up, started playing with it, found all kinds of problems (esp not matching advertised claims), and told him about it. She claimed he banned her from his Discord. So, after much hype and BS on both sites, she posted a counter to it all on her blog and Lobsters. Apparently, someone cross-posted it over here without that context, maybe assuming you'd all remember.

Just some backstory for you all there. I was speculating he was full of shit when he made the claims. She just proved it with hard data.

May I remind you that you are not addressing a single point of those I made?

I asked what's the big deal that V's author promised and under-delivered.

This isn't a case of promising to do something and then not meeting that promise. I certainly do that a fair amount myself, where I might promise to get to something but then forget about it or just generally don't achieve it. Unless you're a company providing a product, folks generally aren't going to hold that kind of stuff against you in my experience.

The issue here is that the author made claims that were just not true. As I understand it, the author has updated the presentation of the web site to be clearer, but what I remember, there were a lot of fantastical claims that winded up not being true. There's a big difference between saying, "I hope to accomplish X" and "my software does X." If you're doing the latter repeatedly and it doesn't reflect reality, then people are going to be upset. I'm totally in favor of articles like the OPs, because they prevent other people from wasting their time.

Agreed.

As I said in a sibling comment on the same level as yours, it's just pretty weird how V's author got relentlessly attacked while a ton of other clickbait titles never receive a single complaint. It's really strange.

I've read a lot of the comments, and I don't think "relentlessly attacked" is the phrase I'd use. _Some_ folks were fairly uncharitable, but most from what I saw were flummoxed by the fact that they were mislead, and (rightfully IMO) pointed that out.

Believe it or not, the combination of being blatantly mislead, open source and lots of attention on HN sites and the like, doesn't actually happen that often from what I can see. So I guess it's "strange" in the sense that's it's rare, but it totally makes sense to me.

As I said, it's one thing to promise something and fail to deliver. It's another to state something as if it were true, when it's actually not.

Also, clickbait titles are not even remotely in the same category as what the V author did. It's generally socially acceptable to take a creative license with titles. It's not acceptable to take creative license with precise claims about a technical project. And frankly, people (annoyingly) whine about clickbait titles all the time.

Well, it seems we are on exactly the same page, just living in slightly different filter bubbles.

To V's author credit, he went ahead and updated the website. Let's see if the thing gets traction in the future. It has quite ambitious goals and I remain cautiously skeptical.

Some people would call “promised and under-delivered” a lie, especially when the “promises” were claims about what had already been achieved. Perhaps brazen fibbing is considered normal in the Silicon Valley startup community, but most people find it distasteful.

I find it distasteful too. But the focus on V's author is pretty bizarre. Most of HN submissions have clickbaity nature and almost nobody is complaining about it.

IMO this community made a mountain out of a mole hill when it comes to V. That was my point and I want to make it clear that I am not defending false advertising.

The invention of programming languages is well trodden territory. The original author of this site has written about it: http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

It's hard to get excited about V if you've studied a lot of programming languages and watched some new ones come into use. I also recommend the Artima articles with the designer of C#: https://www.artima.com/intv/anders.html

It would be nice if people were supportive of this effort instead of just pissing on it.

Of course it is incomplete at 0.0.12. Was it over hyped? Sure. Good for him to have time for some marketing of his work next to _actually writing a working compiler with a good start for a standard library_

This thing is real and here to stay.

How about this: instead of writing about frauds and vapourware, contribute to the project. File an issue, fix a bug, work with the author.

We should applaud and encourage these efforts.

Thanks :)

It's 0.0.12, the first public release. What's with all this "vaporware"?

The compiler can already compile itself in 0.3 seconds and is written 100% in V:

https://github.com/vlang/v#installing-v-from-source

It allows building easy cross platform graphical apps: https://github.com/vlang/v/tree/master/examples/tetris

It has easy cross compilation and can even compile itself for another platform: https://twitter.com/v_language/status/1137537130887077890

It allows to build small performant GUI apps like Volt: https://volt-app.com/ (Volt 1.0 RC 1 for macOS has been used by thousands of happy users for several months.)

It powers a simple forum: https://blog.vlang.io/forum And the entire forum is one 65 KB binary.

It can translate and build DOOM: https://github.com/vlang/doom

It has very extensive and simple to read documentation that covers pretty much the entire language: https://vlang.io/docs

I think it's pretty good for 0.0.12.

Come back when it's v1.0 by the end of this year.

It is fantastic work. Please don’t be discouraged and keep hacking on it.

I bet you could also build an active community of contributors around it.

If you have all these great examples, why aren't they on the marketing page instead, and future plans clearly on a roadmap or whatever? They're pretty cool achievements! And something I can now go look at is way more interesting than something thats "coming soon". Good luck with your project, I hope this drama doesn't overshadow it too much long-term (but you're probably better off if you work on your messaging to avoid this topic getting back up over and over)

When you say "it can translate and build DOOM" and suggest that repo is evidence of that fact -- why does that repo contain a single .v source file, p_enemy.v, which contains fewer than 5k loc?

According to your build process, what you actually do is:

1. build ALL OF CHOCOLATE DOOM 2. replace the ONE OBJECT FILE that you translated 3. relink

so, objectively, it cannot "translate and build DOOM" and you shouldn't claim that it can!

This was a fun read, but hating on a language that doesn't even have a minor version yet feels unfair!

Nice hit piece. All of the criticisms could have been patches. Most of the criticisms are exaggerated. Looks like it took 2s to build on the macbook instead of 1. The 'zero dependency' binary links to libc (as if most programmers wouldn't expect this.)

I agree with the sentiment of your post, but I would like to point out that it took 2 seconds for it to throw an error that the file had more than 50k statements. It did not build at all. It’s not really even a valid test.

So you think a C++ translator and hot code reloader can be sent as a patch so easily? What?

Why does the internet care so much? My recollection of the events is that the guy put up a website for an in progress language. Someone else posted it on HN and people started shitting their pants.

The author owes you nothing.

Your recollection is correct.

People don't like that it doesn't yet do everything perfect at 0.0.12.

This article is toxic. So what if he overpromised and underdelivered? I would rather people support his cause and actually build something that delivers on the hype rather than sit on their high throne and shit on ambitious projects.

Not sure the author understands what "Work in Progress" means.

A good portion of the article seems to be taking claims marked (WIP) and saying "hah! gotcha! this doesn't work yet!"

Almost like, I dunno, a work in progress.

They were only marked as WIP when people noticed they were missing.

The article literally has "[wip]" quoted throughout.

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