8 ms·

V looks interesting, and I wish it the very best. However the attitude of the lead developers toward criticism or negative feedback (even if it's not valid) is

by Xevi 4y ago

V looks interesting, and I wish it the very best. However the attitude of the lead developers toward criticism or negative feedback (even if it's not valid) is highly off-putting imo. Everything negative that people say appear to be taken as an "attack", and as far as I've seen they are quick on the trigger in regards to banning or blocking people that they disagree with. And at the very least they just completely disregard all negative feedback as lies, scams, conspiracies, etc. The responses I've read by the devs are in stark contrast to what I've seen in other languages I use, such as Rust. I hope that as the language evolves, the developers will start reflecting on the way that they interact with others and how it impacts people's view of V. I could never justify using a language like V in production if I couldn't even trust the lead developers to be level-headed during criticism. I'm sorry for ranting, I really wish the best for V and its maintainers.

amedvednikov 4y ago
Only I can ban, and I haven't banned anyone in 2 years. You can read my comments here about the attacks. There's actual valid criticism and feedback like in https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 But there's also trolling, harassment, and completely baseless attacks.
- mst 4y ago
  The way Cadey was treated by your community entirely ended my interest in your language.
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    Who's Cadey? Do you have a link?
    - neven 4y ago
      mst probably meant this: https://xeiaso.net/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17 https://xeiaso.net/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17
      - Tozen 4y ago
        I think what was being referred to was any V GitHub posts, which would involve the V community. The V community has nothing to do with nor have any control over blogs and websites owned by others. As for Cadey, it appears the person is continually self promoting, to include odd accounts continually linking to old and outdated blog posts on its website, at the expense of the V language and any chance given (see almost any HN post on V). Cadey (or under various names) was the one that started off smearing V's author and the language with things like "V is vaporware", "V is lying", "recommend against using it for anything", hoping V would die off type nonsense, etc... Mind you, the attacks started against the very first released Alpha, as if it was supposed to be instantly production ready (and that is very much not how programming languages work). So other programming languages are given the benefit of the doubt of even after say 5 or 10 years of development, while V was supposed to be a finished polished language from day 1? Just plain ridiculousness and clear bad intentions.
        colejohnson66 4y ago
        Xe/Christine never claimed V had to be polished on release. That's patently ridiculous. What they said was: the original features were not called out as being goals, so they took them as features that (obviously) didn't work. Those claims were eventually marked as "WIP" or whatever, which is exactly what Xe wanted. No one is claiming an alpha/beta doesn't have bugs, but V promoters like yourself claim any reminder of V's prior actions are saying that. IMO, V has made great strides since the initial release, but none of Xe's claims were inaccurate. All Xe's first post ("V is for Vaporware") did was call out the website as being misleading. Sure, people could see that it's a 0.x release and know it's an alpha/beta, but that's not the point! It didn't say that the features were WIP until after Xe's post. Compare vlang.io two days before Xe's post[0], and the day after their post[1] (notice the addition of "WIP" markers and a new paragraph about 1.0 above the fold). It also doesn't help that any time a post about V comes up, people try to explain these things, but the author and people like you refuse to acknowledge it. What most people want is for V to admit the website was misleading at the beginning, but it is now a bit more clear. What we get instead are conspiratorial claims of brigading to destroy V. Unless people can point to some Discord or Reddit group that actually does conspire to destroy V, it's a hoax. As much as the author wishes, posting negatively about V because of its past is not a conspiracy. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/
rvz 4y ago
corford 4y ago
That's not at all the vibe I get from one of the lead devs posting here. I see it more as frustration from dealing with low effort snipes/trolls. The language used on the main vlang site also seems calm, clear and unsensational (at least to me).
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  > frustration from dealing with low effort snipes/trolls That's exactly what it is :)
- option_key 4y ago
  >The language used on the main vlang site also seems calm, clear and unsensational (at least to me). It wasn't always like this. Back in 2019, its website looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20190303184805/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190303184805/https://vlang.io/ As you can see the website claimed that its compiler is "200x faster" than C compilers, while neglecting to mention that it merely translates V code to C, so you still have to run a C compiler. "400 KB compiler with zero dependencies" (apart from a C compiler and libc). "As fast as C" - a lie. Apart from deceptive marketing, there were serious issues with the code quality of the compiler: https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/d32e538073e55c603992b5b65ebc837b01c28576/compiler/parser.v https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/d32e538073e55c603992b5b65ebc...
  - amedvednikov 4y ago
    "As fast as C" is not a lie. It literally translates to C. The 200x compile speed up referred to C++ compilers, this was vague and hard to measure, since the languages are so different, and was removed. The code may not have been perfect at the time of the 0.0.1 release, but it worked. V could compile itself. Now it's much better and more organized.
    - option_key 4y ago
      >"As fast as C" is not a lie. It literally translates to C. No, just because it outputs C it doesn't mean it's as fast as hand-written C. Using that logic, every language that outputs machine code is as fast as assembly, which is obviously not true.
richbell 4y ago
> I'm sorry for ranting, I really wish the best for V and its maintainers. I appreciate you posting this. I like the premise of V and really want for it to suceed, but this is a good summary of why I think so many people dislike V: the lead dev and community do not engage criticism in good faith. I'm sure V receives its fair share of unwarranted criticism, but a lot of legitimate criticism and questions are either met with a) hostility or b) incredulity, which causes people to dislike the language for fundamental reasons. Both the creator and community members gaslight (for lack of a better word) and act as if they're happy to receive questions or feedback, but even in this thread you can see people being treated like I mentioned above. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947510, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947121, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947014, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947977
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  How's the first link an attack for asking simple questions? (By the way there's not a single question there.)
  - richbell 4y ago
    Initially my intention was to link questions, but I decided to link to any genuine comments that reflect the GP's sentiment. I've updated the language in my comment.
- johnfn 4y ago
  I don't have the time to go through every link, but let's just look at one or two: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947177 I mean, the article linked at the top is just outrageous - just read through it. For instance, it claims that V misleads by claiming that it has no null. But really what the author has done is found a bug in V that allows a variable to be set to null. A bug that unintentionally leads to creation of null is wildly different than V not supporting non-nullability at all. It'd be like using FFI in Rust to set a non-nullable variable to null and claiming that meant Rust had no type safety. It's absurd. I can understand the maintainer's frustration. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212 OP claims V has "huge promises it hasn't kept". V is version 0.3. This seems wildly unfair. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715 OP kicks a conversation in poor faith with "Wanna know something funnier also posted in previous thread?" about a V bug - which HN turns a blind eye to - and then suddenly the HN community pounces on the V maintainer when he gets frustrated in return? What?
johnfn 4y ago
I don't really agree. V seems to attract a much larger than normal swath of people who enjoy trying to score points off of technicalities. e.g. people claiming the entirety of V is an unsafe language because they found a single bug in the compiler, etc. Languages like Rust never garner this sort of point scoring in the comments. > as far as I've seen they are quick on the trigger in regards to banning or blocking people that they disagree with Do you have any source for this claim? Without a source this simply reads as another person trying to sow uncertainty and doubt. I haven't seen anyone banned or blocked on Github.
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  Exactly. The amount of nitpicking is ridiculous. There's an entire article half of which is about a single checker bug that has already been fixed. Or claims like "it uses official system api (libc), therefore you can't say it doesn't have dependencies".
- wb13579 4y ago
  That's because V already lied once about its memory management, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947048. Any highlighting of that fact is met with deflection and dodging. V is still making dubious claims: his newly invented autofree isn't stable even today after years and users are encouraged to use garbage collection instead. It's hard to trust that when we've been lied to already.
  - johnfn 4y ago
    What? "After years and years"... It's version 0.3. Not even stable 1.0. The conversation you had with the maintainer puts you in a worse light than him, in my opinion.
    - wb13580 4y ago
      He's already promised something too good to be true and it turned out to be a lie. From wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/docs#memory https://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/...: "(Work in progress) There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free." I was excited for that. We were all excited for that. Then it wasn't true. I would forgive him but he seems to be continuing. Then he walks that promise back, pretends he never said it and suddenly invents this magical "autofree" system but gives no details on how it works. Rust was never that secretive, it was based on published theory. He claims it removes 90% of reference counting but if that was possible then Swift or Python or anyone else would have done it. If it was based on solid precedent, or there was any research, or he published anything about how it works, or he didn't take donations, or it wasn't advertised on the website, it would be fine. But that's not the case.
mllllv 4y ago
I think the problem initially was that people accused the creator of malice for no reason other than not being more specific about which features were a work in progress. I agree that it's not good to treat every criticism as an attack, but sometimes criticism of V (as an outsider, I've never used it) feels more like anger towards the creator rather than a helpful suggestion. For example, there's a difference between saying "I've found a bug in an advertised feature" and "You're a liar", which is how much of V's critics sound to me.
bakul 4y ago
FWIW, my view is that even the best programmers don't always have perfect non-programming skills and it is better to give them specific objective feedback via bug reports/technical comments etc and not focus on how they are not doing the expected thing or behaving in an expected manner. Focus on and encourage their good work if possible.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Tozen 4y ago
> However the attitude of the lead developers toward criticism or negative feedback... I disagree about that, because there is a major difference between submitting a bug or disagreeing about a claim or feature versus outright trolling, smearing, instigating drama, or trying desperately to create negative public perception. Issues and discussions can be brought to V's GitHub (https://github.com/vlang/v/issues https://github.com/vlang/v/issues, https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions), but instead what various competitors and detractors do is create drama filled smear blogs or bad joke posts (on various websites) against the author or language. That's not any attempt at being helpful or constructive, that's more about slander or to create such negative sentiment in the hope of killing off the language. When issues and discussions are brought peacefully to V's GitHub, they are discussed and debated intelligently. If any such issues have any validity, then they are usually fixed. > Everything negative that people say appear to be taken as an "attack"... That's simply not true. What does happen, is various competitors and detractors do specifically attack and smear the language or author, and who have no intention to want to be helpful or make any improvements. To include engaging in downvoting or trolling those who appear to be V supporters. Such attacks and smears are not about fixing anything, their point is to be destructive, create negative publicity, and dissuade others from using a rival language. If there are those that don't think that is the case, then simply ask yourself why many of those engaging in such attacks and smearing who claim to be technically knowledgeable or interested in using the language are not making their case on V's GitHub? That's where a person can go to improve V and get it production ready. Continually engaging in smearing is not about fixing, improving, nor reaching out to V's developers or community.

by Xevi 4y ago

amedvednikov 4y ago

Only I can ban, and I haven't banned anyone in 2 years. You can read my comments here about the attacks. There's actual valid criticism and feedback like in https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610 But there's also trolling, harassment, and completely baseless attacks.

mst 4y ago
The way Cadey was treated by your community entirely ended my interest in your language.
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  Who's Cadey? Do you have a link?
  - neven 4y ago
    mst probably meant this: https://xeiaso.net/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17 https://xeiaso.net/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17
    - Tozen 4y ago
      I think what was being referred to was any V GitHub posts, which would involve the V community. The V community has nothing to do with nor have any control over blogs and websites owned by others. As for Cadey, it appears the person is continually self promoting, to include odd accounts continually linking to old and outdated blog posts on its website, at the expense of the V language and any chance given (see almost any HN post on V). Cadey (or under various names) was the one that started off smearing V's author and the language with things like "V is vaporware", "V is lying", "recommend against using it for anything", hoping V would die off type nonsense, etc... Mind you, the attacks started against the very first released Alpha, as if it was supposed to be instantly production ready (and that is very much not how programming languages work). So other programming languages are given the benefit of the doubt of even after say 5 or 10 years of development, while V was supposed to be a finished polished language from day 1? Just plain ridiculousness and clear bad intentions.
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        Xe/Christine never claimed V had to be polished on release. That's patently ridiculous. What they said was: the original features were not called out as being goals, so they took them as features that (obviously) didn't work. Those claims were eventually marked as "WIP" or whatever, which is exactly what Xe wanted. No one is claiming an alpha/beta doesn't have bugs, but V promoters like yourself claim any reminder of V's prior actions are saying that. IMO, V has made great strides since the initial release, but none of Xe's claims were inaccurate. All Xe's first post ("V is for Vaporware") did was call out the website as being misleading. Sure, people could see that it's a 0.x release and know it's an alpha/beta, but that's not the point! It didn't say that the features were WIP until after Xe's post. Compare vlang.io two days before Xe's post[0], and the day after their post[1] (notice the addition of "WIP" markers and a new paragraph about 1.0 above the fold). It also doesn't help that any time a post about V comes up, people try to explain these things, but the author and people like you refuse to acknowledge it. What most people want is for V to admit the website was misleading at the beginning, but it is now a bit more clear. What we get instead are conspiratorial claims of brigading to destroy V. Unless people can point to some Discord or Reddit group that actually does conspire to destroy V, it's a hoax. As much as the author wishes, posting negatively about V because of its past is not a conspiracy. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/

rvz 4y ago

corford 4y ago

That's not at all the vibe I get from one of the lead devs posting here. I see it more as frustration from dealing with low effort snipes/trolls. The language used on the main vlang site also seems calm, clear and unsensational (at least to me).

amedvednikov 4y ago
> frustration from dealing with low effort snipes/trolls That's exactly what it is :)
option_key 4y ago
>The language used on the main vlang site also seems calm, clear and unsensational (at least to me). It wasn't always like this. Back in 2019, its website looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20190303184805/https://vlang.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190303184805/https://vlang.io/ As you can see the website claimed that its compiler is "200x faster" than C compilers, while neglecting to mention that it merely translates V code to C, so you still have to run a C compiler. "400 KB compiler with zero dependencies" (apart from a C compiler and libc). "As fast as C" - a lie. Apart from deceptive marketing, there were serious issues with the code quality of the compiler: https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/d32e538073e55c603992b5b65ebc837b01c28576/compiler/parser.v https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/d32e538073e55c603992b5b65ebc...
- amedvednikov 4y ago
  "As fast as C" is not a lie. It literally translates to C. The 200x compile speed up referred to C++ compilers, this was vague and hard to measure, since the languages are so different, and was removed. The code may not have been perfect at the time of the 0.0.1 release, but it worked. V could compile itself. Now it's much better and more organized.
  - option_key 4y ago
    >"As fast as C" is not a lie. It literally translates to C. No, just because it outputs C it doesn't mean it's as fast as hand-written C. Using that logic, every language that outputs machine code is as fast as assembly, which is obviously not true.

richbell 4y ago

> I'm sorry for ranting, I really wish the best for V and its maintainers. I appreciate you posting this. I like the premise of V and really want for it to suceed, but this is a good summary of why I think so many people dislike V: the lead dev and community do not engage criticism in good faith. I'm sure V receives its fair share of unwarranted criticism, but a lot of legitimate criticism and questions are either met with a) hostility or b) incredulity, which causes people to dislike the language for fundamental reasons. Both the creator and community members gaslight (for lack of a better word) and act as if they're happy to receive questions or feedback, but even in this thread you can see people being treated like I mentioned above. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947510, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947121, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947014, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947977

amedvednikov 4y ago
How's the first link an attack for asking simple questions? (By the way there's not a single question there.)
- richbell 4y ago
  Initially my intention was to link questions, but I decided to link to any genuine comments that reflect the GP's sentiment. I've updated the language in my comment.
johnfn 4y ago
I don't have the time to go through every link, but let's just look at one or two: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947177 I mean, the article linked at the top is just outrageous - just read through it. For instance, it claims that V misleads by claiming that it has no null. But really what the author has done is found a bug in V that allows a variable to be set to null. A bug that unintentionally leads to creation of null is wildly different than V not supporting non-nullability at all. It'd be like using FFI in Rust to set a non-nullable variable to null and claiming that meant Rust had no type safety. It's absurd. I can understand the maintainer's frustration. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212 OP claims V has "huge promises it hasn't kept". V is version 0.3. This seems wildly unfair. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715 OP kicks a conversation in poor faith with "Wanna know something funnier also posted in previous thread?" about a V bug - which HN turns a blind eye to - and then suddenly the HN community pounces on the V maintainer when he gets frustrated in return? What?

johnfn 4y ago

I don't really agree. V seems to attract a much larger than normal swath of people who enjoy trying to score points off of technicalities. e.g. people claiming the entirety of V is an unsafe language because they found a single bug in the compiler, etc. Languages like Rust never garner this sort of point scoring in the comments. > as far as I've seen they are quick on the trigger in regards to banning or blocking people that they disagree with Do you have any source for this claim? Without a source this simply reads as another person trying to sow uncertainty and doubt. I haven't seen anyone banned or blocked on Github.

amedvednikov 4y ago
Exactly. The amount of nitpicking is ridiculous. There's an entire article half of which is about a single checker bug that has already been fixed. Or claims like "it uses official system api (libc), therefore you can't say it doesn't have dependencies".
wb13579 4y ago
That's because V already lied once about its memory management, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947048. Any highlighting of that fact is met with deflection and dodging. V is still making dubious claims: his newly invented autofree isn't stable even today after years and users are encouraged to use garbage collection instead. It's hard to trust that when we've been lied to already.
- johnfn 4y ago
  What? "After years and years"... It's version 0.3. Not even stable 1.0. The conversation you had with the maintainer puts you in a worse light than him, in my opinion.
  - wb13580 4y ago
    He's already promised something too good to be true and it turned out to be a lie. From wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/docs#memory https://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/...: "(Work in progress) There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free." I was excited for that. We were all excited for that. Then it wasn't true. I would forgive him but he seems to be continuing. Then he walks that promise back, pretends he never said it and suddenly invents this magical "autofree" system but gives no details on how it works. Rust was never that secretive, it was based on published theory. He claims it removes 90% of reference counting but if that was possible then Swift or Python or anyone else would have done it. If it was based on solid precedent, or there was any research, or he published anything about how it works, or he didn't take donations, or it wasn't advertised on the website, it would be fine. But that's not the case.

mllllv 4y ago

I think the problem initially was that people accused the creator of malice for no reason other than not being more specific about which features were a work in progress. I agree that it's not good to treat every criticism as an attack, but sometimes criticism of V (as an outsider, I've never used it) feels more like anger towards the creator rather than a helpful suggestion. For example, there's a difference between saying "I've found a bug in an advertised feature" and "You're a liar", which is how much of V's critics sound to me.

bakul 4y ago

FWIW, my view is that even the best programmers don't always have perfect non-programming skills and it is better to give them specific objective feedback via bug reports/technical comments etc and not focus on how they are not doing the expected thing or behaving in an expected manner. Focus on and encourage their good work if possible.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Tozen 4y ago

> However the attitude of the lead developers toward criticism or negative feedback... I disagree about that, because there is a major difference between submitting a bug or disagreeing about a claim or feature versus outright trolling, smearing, instigating drama, or trying desperately to create negative public perception. Issues and discussions can be brought to V's GitHub (https://github.com/vlang/v/issues https://github.com/vlang/v/issues, https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions), but instead what various competitors and detractors do is create drama filled smear blogs or bad joke posts (on various websites) against the author or language. That's not any attempt at being helpful or constructive, that's more about slander or to create such negative sentiment in the hope of killing off the language. When issues and discussions are brought peacefully to V's GitHub, they are discussed and debated intelligently. If any such issues have any validity, then they are usually fixed. > Everything negative that people say appear to be taken as an "attack"... That's simply not true. What does happen, is various competitors and detractors do specifically attack and smear the language or author, and who have no intention to want to be helpful or make any improvements. To include engaging in downvoting or trolling those who appear to be V supporters. Such attacks and smears are not about fixing anything, their point is to be destructive, create negative publicity, and dissuade others from using a rival language. If there are those that don't think that is the case, then simply ask yourself why many of those engaging in such attacks and smearing who claim to be technically knowledgeable or interested in using the language are not making their case on V's GitHub? That's where a person can go to improve V and get it production ready. Continually engaging in smearing is not about fixing, improving, nor reaching out to V's developers or community.