Thankfully much of the controversy around V has escaped me. The clashes between proponents and detractors has mostly occurred on my periphery and it comes across rather silly to me. And I realize that will make me unpopular with both sides. It reminds me more of highschoolers arguing rather than than engineers actually trying to solve something, in that no one is fully wrong and everyone is a little bit right.
One side should realize they're deriding a project that's still in its infancy and it's bound to be unfinished, buggy, off-kilter, and missing features that are still more or less just rough ideas in the heads of the creators. The same can be said for any early project.
And one side needs to accept the creators were a bit overzealous and advertised features that we're really just rough ideas in their heads. And that fighting criticism with anger just makes those criticizing double down in their energy and aggressiveness.
I'm sure V will be a fine language some day. I actually like the simple style of Go's syntax. It's a breath of fresh air when you're up to your neck in "Value<double, SIUnits::m> distance;" Though I question if it actually brings anything new more than some nicer syntax. I might wait until it's closer to a v1 and make something in it for my blog.
Thanks for saying all this, probably one of the more mature insights. Personally I find V to already be a fine language - it improves on everything I feel Go just slightly missed the mark on.
Regarding the hostility towards the performance claims; even if they aren't reaching those claims, the language is nonetheless extremely fast - so fast, that missing the claims is a mute point from a user perspective. It uses TCC on the backend; which everyone knows, and nobody disputes, is a very small and fast compiler.
I understand/derive people are maybe upset the author is getting Patreon/Github donations based (in their opinion) on these 'false' claims. I don't think that's the case at all - people are thinking it's causation, when it's mere correlation.
It's a still-obscure language, and it's not like they are selling Norwex cleaning supplies at a convention of everyday people walking by. The landing page isn't attracting your family relative, compelling them to donate money on Patreon. It's an extremely small group of people that are going to pay even the slightest interest to the project. People who have an interest in a boutique languages and providing monetary support are more than likely doing so out of interest in the project's goals (obtainable, or otherwise), appealing syntax, ambitions of the author, github activity, and general goodness; not solely off some bullets on a landing page - especially in a world where we know 99% of that is always shilled bullshit from VC's, bigbox products, etc. etc.
Undoubtedly, the author could have maybe done better PR - who doesn't stumble at first though? Like, really. Everything I see referenced is from articles 2.5-3 years old... from a single blog to boot. Notwithstanding, the donations (which seem to be the target of most peoples comments), are around $1,000/month; this isn't really a large amount of money; but people are acting like this is $20,000/month.
To some degree, part of the thing which places V in the spotlight for such drama is it being brought up in quite a few zig (and of course other) posts with a note on how the community is in some way treating V unfairly despite this being around 2-3 years ago along with excuses [1] for what took place. It would be better if there were more V posts instead which focus on it's merits or projects rather than holding on to and bringing up that most would have forgotten/walked away from by now.
[1] not the best word but I can't think of a better one at the moment.
One side should realize they're deriding a project that's still in its infancy and it's bound to be unfinished, buggy, off-kilter, and missing features that are still more or less just rough ideas in the heads of the creators. The same can be said for any early project.
And one side needs to accept the creators were a bit overzealous and advertised features that we're really just rough ideas in their heads. And that fighting criticism with anger just makes those criticizing double down in their energy and aggressiveness.
I'm sure V will be a fine language some day. I actually like the simple style of Go's syntax. It's a breath of fresh air when you're up to your neck in "Value<double, SIUnits::m> distance;" Though I question if it actually brings anything new more than some nicer syntax. I might wait until it's closer to a v1 and make something in it for my blog.