It's not what programming languages do, it's what they shepherd you to

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • v

    Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io

  • > ...the first thing you see is vlang.io, which contains many false claims...

    There are no outright false claims or lies on the vlang.io main page, in my opinion. Debatably, there are some disputable or questionable claims, which mostly center around comparing V to other programming languages. This appears to be where the hostility towards V comes from, and where advocates of similar competing languages feel they are compared unfavorable, so are possibly out for "revenge" or upset.

    Those upset at various claims by the comparison of V to their favorite language, might be better served to study V in more detail. Simply saying they are "lying", without ever having used V or knowing anything about its development details, results in erroneous counter claims or comes off very odd to those who have used V. I made a point of providing links, so that those making such counter claims, could either download or examine information about V.

    Comparisons and competitiveness is inevitable, but clearly, there is nowhere for the outrageous opinion that V is vaporware, after 84 releases and weekly updates on GitHub (https://github.com/vlang/v/releases).

    > For V, on the comparaison page with Go: "- No GC", on the main page of V: "Most objects (~90-100%) are freed by V's autofree engine: the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation. Remaining small percentage of objects is freed via GC.". Either no GC is false, or the frontpage gives false informations about memory management. In both case that's not inspiring confidence.

    It's quite telling that is the focus of saying V is "lying" or is "vaporware", which is not on the front page, but a link to comparing it with other languages (in this case Go).

    If a person bothered to take time to use V, or study the discussion and issues on it's GitHub, they would have likely realized that the intent of the V developers/contributors appears to be to use the autofree engine. The existing capability to use GC (-gc boehm) is both optional and experimental, because autofree isn't finished yet.

    GC is not a feature of V, as its considered too slow, and the experimental -gc boehm appears to be provided for temporary purposes. This can be assumed through reading of their discussions and issues by developers and contributors to users on their GitHub.

    On V's web page, they make it very clear that the autofree engine won't be ready until 0.3 (they are at 0.2.4). And they will allow for the disabling of autofree, -noautofree.

  • v-mode

    🌻 An Emacs major mode for the V programming language.

  • > In regards to V's web page (https://vlang.io/), they describe the language relatively accurately, in addition to promotion.

    No they don't, see my various points that you have ignored about false claims. You're again talking a lot about bias, as if I was defending another language "against" V. I am not. I'm judging V on what they show, and the first thing you see is vlang.io, which contains many false claims, and has contained them for years now. You're right that consistency is important. The actual developement behind the language seems to be going well, which is great. All I'm asking is for them to stop lying and making false claims on their page, because this completly breaks my trust in them.

    > For example, Nim describes itself as "efficient, expressive, elegant". Really? Is that a "wild claim" too or simple self promotion?

    For the record, I think Nim marketing (on the page or by people using it) is also exagerated, and that's one of the thing that makes me avoid it. Their claims are more vague, which makes them harder to refute, but for example:

    > Modern type system with local type inference, tuples, generics and sum types.

    That's ML. 1973. I wouldn't call that "modern". But that's more of a nitpick. The website of Nim is in general more reasonable about their claims. It doesn't say "here are the coreutils, reimplemented in Nim" while pointing ot an empty repo.

    For V, on the comparaison page with Go: "- No GC", on the main page of V: "Most objects (~90-100%) are freed by V's autofree engine: the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation. Remaining small percentage of objects is freed via GC.". Either no GC is false, or the frontpage gives false informations about memory management. In both case that's not inspiring confidence.

    > If anything, the "wild claim" is to keep saying or pretending V is vaporware, as if it doesn't exist, after more than 84 releases (they just had a new one), YouTube videos, ebooks, documentation, etc...

    V, as in the language that's on github.com/vlang, exists and is very real. V, as in the language described on vlang.io, doesn't. They had two full years to fix this, and they didn't. So this means that at best, showing correct information is not high-priority for them. This goes against my values. Since you're accusing pretty much everyone else of showing bias, I can get a bit paranoid too. Maybe they keep a page like that because it'll make people talk about the language. Maybe it will even convince a few people to try. I can't accept that attitude coming from people working on a compiler, and thus won't use V as long as this issue exists.

    > True, many languages and projects have failed. This then demonstrates that V's present weekly release schedule makes them even more credible. They are demonstrating that they can independently stand with Rust, Go, Zig, and Nim as a useful language.

    We are using two different definition of "failed" here. I could work on a C replacement for 50 years, and say that it "stand with Rust, Go, Zig and Nim as a useful language". Which would be technically true. But people here often talk about popularity. In that sense, V stands with Zig and Nim as "known by a few people but not much more", while Rust and Go now have a place in the industry.

    I also wish you would spend less time accusing me of being biased against V and spend more time explaining to me why the main page of V still has wrong information in the favor of V 2 years later. It's easy to dismiss any external criticism as competition trying to put you down. Some people are probably doing this. But there is still valid criticism from non-users, like what I'm offering here. You're free to take it or leave it.

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    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • duckduckgo-locales

    Translation files for <a href="https://duckduckgo.com"> </a>

  • A somewhat more established term for this is "affordance". See the results for https://duckduckgo.com/?q=programming+language+affordance , for instance.

  • kubespawner

    Kubernetes spawner for JupyterHub

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