If you do a search in these comments for people who have actually given him money, I think you'll find that none of us have done so under the pretense that all the features he listed on the website are finished.
We're also not "buying" anything. We're supporting a developer who is writing a language we would like to one day use. How else is it going to get written? Do we expect somebody to toil away in obscurity for no pay for 5+ years first?
I would consider it money well spent even if he never finishes it. I'm voting for the language I want with my wallet.
Yes, this opens me up to making me feel like a sucker if he is a scam artist. But, he's delivered things in the past and he's delivered things even since the last conversation. Most frauds don't ship.
It's not about founding or donation, it's all about false promises. How you can give false assumptions about something which does not exists and it's not provable. I'm thinking here about all the optimistic features the author is acclaiming. As some of the commenters mentioned practically is impossible to build a product (a new programming language) in solo and having only a couple of thousands of LOC.
You need to stop. There are no false promises or false assumptions going on here. If there were, then the negative coverage over the past three days would include outrage from his patreon subscribers and his patreon donations would have gone down considerably. Neither of these things have happened.
Funding programming language development via Patreon is relatively new that it might be a reasonable characterization. I do think that many PL projects are underfunded and should have better BMs to sustain itself, and one positive aspect of V is that it showed you can actually have a good chance of sustainable cash inflow with proper marketing (more generally, [1] is a good start).
If you do a search in these comments for people who have actually given him money, I think you'll find that none of us have done so under the pretense that all the features he listed on the website are finished.
We're also not "buying" anything. We're supporting a developer who is writing a language we would like to one day use. How else is it going to get written? Do we expect somebody to toil away in obscurity for no pay for 5+ years first?
I would consider it money well spent even if he never finishes it. I'm voting for the language I want with my wallet.
Yes, this opens me up to making me feel like a sucker if he is a scam artist. But, he's delivered things in the past and he's delivered things even since the last conversation. Most frauds don't ship.