Resolving the tension between beginner friendliness and advanced usage

MateuszKowalewski · July 1, 2023, 11:06am

Regarding websites, and marketing in general:

Want to see a language website that really sells shit? Go here: https://vlang.io/

Mind you, almost everything on this website and around V-Lang in general is a lie.

github.com/vlang/v

This language is not as advertised

opened 12:29AM - 20 Mar 19 UTC

closed 02:45AM - 02 Jun 22 UTC

gingerBill

Type: Discussion

This language is not as advertised --- This language does not do over 90% of… what is advertised. Most of what is advertised is not coherent with most of the claims you have stated. With the new release of the playground, most of the examples in the docs fail, even many of the extremely basic ones. * You appear to do very basic tokenization/lexing which you use to naïvely convert the code into C or C++ (through testing of the playground) * The converter program does virtually no semantic checking other than the most basic type checking * Name lookups do not respect nested scopes within functions and caused the playground to crash * There is poor checking for certain characters and tokens you disallow * Record types and their methods must be declared before use, the type before the methods * The playground was crashing frequently * The playground is extremely insecure You have previously claimed that the V compiler uses no AST. However, most of the features that you claim would require a form of AST to even work, including generics and interfaces. An AST is an abstract syntax tree, which means that it just stores data about the syntax that is in a tree-like format. It's pretty much impossible to not have unless you have a very basic language or doing naïve transformations into another similar language. --- You claim that the language has no runtime but the following require a runtime: * All arrays are dynamic * `println` * Threads with `go` * Synchronization of threads with `runtime.wait()` * Automatic memory management --- ``` Things that are currently broken: - Automatic imports - Interface method calls - Interfaces have to be declared with `type Foo interface {` - Foo{a,b} syntax (use Foo{a:a, b:b}) - Closures - a[i].field - Locks (lock {}). Use sync.Mutex for now. - Enums Disabled features: - Generics ``` Why was the playground lacking a lot of basic functionality? If most of these extremely basic features are broken, how could you have made any software in this language other than basic things? -- e.g. Fibonacci examples. Software claimed to be built in V: * Volt * Filey * Vid * gitly * Hot code reloading Claimed C/C++ Translations into V: * DOOM * DOOM 3 * LevelDB * SQLite --- Claims from your "compare" page: ``` - No null ``` How would you handle pointers?! In your documentation, you demonstrate that pointers exist. This means that `no null` is false. Pointers also crashed the playground. ``` - Much stricter vfmt ``` And when you mean stricter, what does that mean? It was also failing quite often even on basic code in the playground. ``` - Cheaper interfaces without dynamic dispatch ``` So how do they work? Is it just static dispatch? --- What you have promised does not even come close to what is delivered.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/j4sjdb/the_v_programming_language/

Still it has over 30% more stars on GitHub than Scala 2 & 3 together!

V is done by a complete amateur (and liar) who built a string replace “compiler”, PHP v1 grade. Nothing of the promised stuff will ever work because there is no concept behind. Still a lot people buying the marketing!

I don’t say that Scala should use such shady tactics to sell. Scala doesn’t need that!

If Scala would show off just 30% of the things how it can make Avarage-Jos’s life easier, and what cool capability to do concrete things it unlocks this would be already very effective marketing.

This includes of course not only concentrating on one capability! Having an One-Trick-Pony doesn’t sell to a broad audience. But Scala is (thankfully still) not an One-Trick-Pony. You can use it in all kinds of circumstances. This should be advertised accordingly.

In some fields Scala is even completely unique. No other general purpose language has for example broad standing in hardware development like Scala has with Chisel. RISC-V land is mostly Scala land… But almost nobody is talking about that. (Maybe because nobody there cares about “pure FP” Haskell-style, but all what counts are the DSL features? Which get treat lately almost as an orphan, which is not good.)

markehammons · July 5, 2023, 12:48pm

I wouldn’t point to stars as an example of V being of more interest to people. Buying github stars is a thing, and if that guy is lying about what can be done with his language to boost his language (and you accuse him of doing just that), it’s not inconceivable that he would buy stars to present his language project as high-interest on github.

phrmoy · July 5, 2023, 3:20pm

Don’t care much about V, even if the work were legit, which I know nothing about that, I wouldn’t pick that betting my start-up’s future on it. Certainly not about the number of stars alone, but industry readiness is what I am looking at. V does not reflect that. Should anyone want to model “marketing” (term which I am not too much of a fan either), I would dispense V as a template. Great industry-driven examples are F# and Julia.

bishabosha · July 11, 2023, 10:03am

We (the Scala Center) have just launched a new look for the homepage of scala-lang.org which puts more emphasis on the use cases for Scala. please take a look (may need to reset caches).

phrmoy · July 11, 2023, 2:30pm

That is some good improvement and a great start! I will hold on to my thoughts for now and simply appreciate what’s been done. Thank you!

SethTisue · July 11, 2023, 3:00pm

The PR with the changes is Updates to the homepage - add new tagline, why scala? and use cases by bishabosha · Pull Request #1518 · scala/scala-lang · GitHub , in case you don’t have the old state of the page memorized

hepin1989 · July 13, 2023, 7:33am

I think have better Java interopt is essential too.

phrmoy · July 13, 2023, 11:21am

For the data science crowd, Python’s as well. https://scalapy.dev/ seems like a good start, but as it is, it does not seem ready for prime time yet. Not to mention the build process which looks very complicated.