
V Is for Vaporware - xena
https://christine.website/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23
======
pdimitar
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_?

~~~
detaro
> _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?

~~~
pdimitar
> _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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230384)
(which is a child of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351](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.

~~~
detaro
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!

~~~
pdimitar
(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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393)

~~~
detaro
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.

~~~
pdimitar
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. ^_^

~~~
detaro
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.

------
benatkin
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](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](https://www.artima.com/intv/anders.html)

------
st3fan
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.

~~~
amedvednikov
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](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](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](https://twitter.com/v_language/status/1137537130887077890)

It allows to build small performant GUI apps like Volt: [https://volt-
app.com/](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](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](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](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.

~~~
detaro
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)

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

------
readme
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.)

~~~
monkpit
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.

------
adamnemecek
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.

~~~
amedvednikov
Your recollection is correct.

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

------
laylomo2
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.

------
fastball
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.

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

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

