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by brabel
550 days ago
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A lot of newer devs seem to have this attitude. They start a little hobby project and think they solved all problems of the world and start shouting about their project on social media and forums... in reality, the project is just a toy, of course, much of the time. But the users may not have a clue and may believe the author if they get enough hype. I think that at least one example of that which had very real consequences is the V Programming Language. It attracted quite a lot of hype, and there's not so much "hype budget" to go around with PLs. They started getting quite a lot of donations and sponsors, despite never delivering on most of the points that made their project unique, while other more serious projects, like Zig and Nim, which were really delivering good stuff, for some time didn't get as much attention. I think Andrew Kelly himself expressed this feeling at some point (sorry if it wasn't him, my memory is haze). |
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V started from a former professional Go programmer (Alex), creating programs for himself, because he was frustrated with using Go and it missing features that he wanted[1]. He started a new language, which he used to make Volt, Vid/Ved, etc... Others, finding out about his new language, pushed him to make it public. It looks like he was in collaboration with some other developers, when working on Volt.
Others posted about his programming language and pushed him to make it public. Relatively soon afterwards, he came into conflict with creators of competing languages, like Zig (the Andrew Kelly that you mention) and some others (Odin's GingerBill). The conflict appears to have turned hot, originally, because they claimed the language did not exist. That it was something "fake" that he (Alex) made up, but was getting Patreon money from supporters. Clearly that was wrong, and the V language was released on GitHub. Soon afterwards, numerous contributors joined in the effort and gave it stars.
The main push, "of hype", looks to mostly have come from books written about V[2][3] and perhaps the addition of angry competitors constantly talking about it. Zig and Odin have only recently published books about their languages, mainly in 2024, despite that these languages have existed since around 2015 (and have not achieved 1.0 yet). The V language is of course going to get more "hype" or "attention", if it has actual books about it. While in contrast and for years, its competitors had nothing published or didn't/don't even have a Wikipedia page.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dIAcNp9bJs (A small presentation of V's features at IBM...origin story from 6 min)
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Programming-end-end-e... (2021)
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-basic-Japanese-e... (2020)