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Comment by Tozen | Hacker News Reader

Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago, which state that V is vaporware and before the language was even released? This is 2022, not 2019, and we are talking a hundred releases later (https://github.com/vlang/v/releases).

At least stick to the current evaluation (or attack), which is more relevant, and make points from there. But, keep in mind that these attacks are on a young language that isn't 1.0 yet, so even with this we are talking about a moving target. The language is still evolving.

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I don't have a horse in this race, but when a language makes present-tense claims about its features I assume that they're already functioning features.

People are poking holes in V because its claims are unfounded, not because they've decided they're in competition with the language. A simple "work in progress" sign on the features in question would draw a lot of fire away from the language and its creator.

Indeed! I even mentioned this in my "Rules of engagement" section:

> Features indicated to be incomplete/work in progress/unimplemented will be mentioned as such.

Indicating on the vlang.io homepage how much of the language has yet to be realized would go a long way in my opinion.

After I criticized the project for collecting donations on deceitful information, the author put purple "WIP" labels next to a bunch of stuff [1] which led me to make this statement [2]. However, it looks like medvednikov has since removed the "WIP" labels.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/

[2]: https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418

From his perspective, he's been Working on them ;)

Credit to both you and him for the passion and effort put in. I just think his excitement bubbles over into an unfortunate way of communicating (lets call it cute)

Communication is something you're excellent at, in a large part due to your truthfulness

I just think vlang is living in and expressing dreams and visions. Which I agree has problems, but creating a language is an aspirational endeavour

You know something, some of us are HAPPY donators for 3 years now and we're fine and feel that our investment is worthy. I really think you are terribly misrepresenting the situation.

Your keep calling people "competitors." I don't think you're using the word right. Perhaps "detractors" is what you mean, but "reviewers" is more neutral. Xe and mawfig don't appear to be offering their own languages to compete with V. At one point, Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered.

One reason that people highlight older criticism is because it's useful to examine past behavior, past promises, and contrast them to current behavior and current promises. If V is going to improve its reputation, it's going to do it by (a) making good on the promises it can, (b) coming clean on the promises it can't, and (c) offer a clear win for some distinguishing featureset. Badgering people to shut up about the past isn't on that list.

> Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered

AFAIK your stated reason for the silence is not accurate. Andy’s criticisms were always based on V making claims that no one could evaluate because it was closed source/unreleased (and then used those claims to solicit money from people). Once V was made open source, those criticisms no longer applied, as things like TFA could be written.

Ah, fair enough, my memory is imperfect and I'm not inclined to paw through old HN comments.

Edit: ack, and I misspelled his name and the edit window closed

No, he also had criticisms like "the V compiler depends on an OpenGL context creation library, so the claim that it has zero dependencies is false, the author is a scammer".

Yeah you can't buy trust. Once it's done is done.

I'm not touching a language developed by folks who don't see a problem in scamming users, sorry.

No scamming coming here whatsoever. And this is coming from a LONG TERM patron/donor.

Financial supporter of V here. I don't feel scammed or misled at all. So keep speaking for yourself with the imaginary money you did not donate nor lose.

> Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago...

This question is answered in the comment you just replied to:

> She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.

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