Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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