How many of Dodrill's problems have they solved so far?
is not an acceptable thing to do.
Nitpicking one liners like that from a huge one man project that has just been released is ridiculous.
Luckily the language continues to grow at a rapid pace despite all clickbait vaporware articles.
I never understood that mentality without having some personal connection to the topic or a deep understanding of the topic.
I see the [wip] progress labels all over the site now, I guess some people need it to be explicitly labeled before the give a full break down of what you've made!
Indeed.
These [wip] labels were there before this vaporware article :)
Only a day or two at most according to archive.org. No WIP labels on 2019-06-21 (the closest snapshot available before the article was published)[1]. WIP labels exist on 2019-06-24 (the closest snapshot to the articles date)[2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/
A lot of the criticism of V takes aim at how the language was advertised which strikes a lot of people as rightfully annoying in the "C++ killer" space, something that a lot of people have put a lot of hard work already into which should not be entirely out of hand (this space is becoming very crowded for attention). If V's code remained the same at launch with its author choosing to be a little more conservative and thoughtful with its announcement, this type of response would not have happened. Its author did not make the status of the language entirely clear. When Odin came out a year ago, Lobster half a year ago, Zig three years ago, or Mun a month ago (of whom its authors were considerably modest: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822), sure, they were critiqued, but they were not met with the specific kind of response V had for a reason.
Keep in mind languages (that don't aim to be toys) should rightfully be subject to a greater degree of criticism as their goals are primarily to upend a domain in such a way that if they fail, it renders the efforts of a lot of other people writing code in that language as something for naught. People take gambles when they adopt new technologies in general, but languages (maybe operating systems by extension) are of a significantly different scope.
https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35
I don't want to discount all of the work people have put into V. It is clear that they have made considerable progress since earlier this year and I commend them for pushing the language into a more usable state. Nevertheless, I still retain a considerable degree of skepticism.
> Claims to "being able to now compile itself in 0.09 seconds" whilst pushing the need for an AST to the side represents a serious problem in the language's general direction
Critique for focusing on fast compilation times? :)
Any valid criticism?
Using codegen to handle the JSON stuff is clever, sure, but it certainly makes me uneasy! It gives a very Jenga Tower impression of the state of the project...
Why? That thread seems to talk about this in the context of serialization and the way your parent poster is proposing is pretty common in the microprocessing world since dynamic parsing would be wasteful and, given fixed data structure, can be unnecessary in some cases.
Honestly, the most interesting thing to me as an outsider in that whole github issue you posted is how much mudslinging and animosity seems to be going around in the PL development community. It's not like people are forced to use alpha releases of random programming languages popping up on github.
Fwiw, I'm not sure what you mean by AST in the context, but if you're talking about an actual in-memory AST, there's (once again) research in getting rid of it for compilation.
Not even on the internet. Have an idea, people reflexively shit on it.
When I see an idea unless it's utterly broken I try to figure out how you make it work. Not pat oneself on the back for coming up with some trite reason why it won't.
Ripping on a WIP project is not an acceptable thing to do.
Even the title "V is for Vaporware" is just oozing bias and condescension, and makes me lose any respect for the author.
The name-calling is what makes me uneasy.
The complaints were that all the claims were WIPs, and none of them were implemented and working to a level that can be relied on and used. Yet the project had already gotten more donations than other similar projects that are way further into their development.
Then, a lot of language programmers with credentials behind them came out and basically tried to warn people that going from WIP to Production with all those claimed features is very hard and the chances of failure for V are high. That there was a reason no language currently existed that had all those claimed features together. Doing so is very challenging.
So at that point, the outrage was that some people are potentially being fooled into donating for something that will never meet its claims, a.k.a, Vaporware. Or that it's unfair to donate to V, where it could be similarly donated to other languages that's been at it for longer which could make it all happen sooner.
Now, here's my take. I think the criticism is fair. I think the odds of V being a better language than all the other existing ones once it's ready and done are slim. But, I also think that it having had better marketing, bold claims, and clear ambitions, might be the only chance it has at making it. The funding it's getting, the support from other contributors that showed up after all the marketing push, that could pay off. Look at the commit history pre/post all the marketing. I've never seen an open source project that's so early in development having so many contributors beyond the ones that are made by a company hiring a team.
Basically, I feel tech people underestimate the value of marketing and a good sales man. These things are needed to build a good product as well. You can't build anything without resources. Steve Jobs couldn't have built the iPhone from a technical angle, but the engineers couldn't have built the iPhone without Steve Jobs enabling its focused development.
All the luck to V, and all the other languages to be honest. I don't care how it happens, through overblown marketing, clickbait articles, or through academic rhetoric, or from pure passion, or through someone working in a cave somewhere disconnected and coming out of it all of a sudden, etc. I just would like for it to happen.
Completely false.
Only a small part of the features was WIP.
Focusing on the fact that the language is written 100% in itself from the start? Nope!
Mention that it builds itself in <1 second? Nah
Graphics library, DOOM's p_enemy.c translated to p_enemy.v which can be compiled and replace p_enemy.o, safety features? No.
The language can be bootstrapped with "cc v.c" without any dependencies? Who cares!
There's a temporary one-line os.system() hack? VAPORWARE!
Here's how it looks like, although it doesn't compile at the moment:
https://github.com/vlang/doom/blob/master/p_enemy.v
I have to finish this project asap.
Overly emotional attachment to one’s technical ideas and works is only a recipe for eventual mental stagnation. To be clear though, I’m not claiming this is necessarily an issue for the parent.
As far as I know, several of these features were not marked as WIP when this article was posted. Additionally, no features were marked at all close to the article's posting. From the article:
> This article was posted on 2019-06-23. Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.
One if its criticisms is the claim on memory management. Here's an snapshot of it on 2019-06-25: https://web.archive.org/web/20190625172349/https://vlang.io/.... Here's the page now, marked as WIP: https://vlang.io/docs#memory.
You could argue that you simply forgot to mark these. I'm not going to go into discussion about that, but I just want to say that the author's claims seem legitimate at the time of posting.
> ... and that the first public alpha release is not stable.
Another quote from the article:
> Thanks for reading this far. I hope this feedback can help make V a productive tool for programming. It’s a shame it seems to have been hyped so much for comparatively so little as a result. The developer has been hyping and selling this language like it’s the new sliced bread. It is not. This is a very alpha product. I bet you could use it for productive development as is if you really stuck your head into it, but as it stands I recommend against using it for anything.
> The language can be bootstrapped with "cc v.c" without any dependencies? Who cares!
One of the article's criticisms is that that claim isn't (wasn't?) true.