An interlude:

Apparently, my experience with the Zig community was more par for the course than I had imagined.

I asked the V community for feedback on the V article, and they told me I should spend more time discussing V’s memory management — which I only mentioned in passing, choosing to highlight the flagship “autofree” feature and not explicitly noting that it’s also possible to manually perform heap allocations.

I deemed this out of scope for a very rough overview. But that — together with my impression that the current state was somewhat fragile — apparently upset the entire community rather badly:

“The blog post had numerous factual errors and was full of misinformation. To the extent that when it was posted on Hacker News, it was flagged and the title removed, which is very unusual for them. It appears the post was such egregious clickbait, in addition to trying to stir up language flamewars and drama, that their moderators aren’t tolerating it. To the OP, of course particular competitors and individuals associated with them, will encourage or instigate others to carry out attacks for them against the V language or whichever competitors are on their target list. They will attempt to convert you or anyone susceptible into being their tool. Sincerely hope you can find the moral courage to resist being recruited for such unethical behavior, for the love of programming and allowing people to freely choose.” link

For the record: getting something “flagged” on HN is something anyone can do — not just moderators. I encouraged the V community to comment and correct any mistakes in the text. Instead, they went for the “take it down, it’s misinformation!” approach.

What they actually seem to disagree with aren’t really the facts, but the interpretations:

“This piece cherry-picks misfires, ignores the last couple years of solid momentum, and pads its case with biased jabs while skipping repos that actually ship code in V. It lands as a “see, I told you so” hit, not a balanced review… Its takes on memory, stdlib, and maturity are half-true at best.” link

(I’m sure that’s what it looks like from within the bubble)

As a counterpoint to this a previous V contributor showed weighted in:

“I disagree. Having been a previous V developer contributing to the language (though arguably very little), the issues of missed deadlines, fake it till you make it and more seems completely valid.

If you join the Discord and search for “this week”, “this month”, “next week” and “next month” with Alex Medvednikov as the author, you’ll see 80+ (yes, that many) missed deadlines, some that go all the way back to 2019. Version 0.3 promised autofree and a syntax freeze, it got none of those. I remember discussing this with Alex, saying that it would be ideal, to publicly mention that autofree wouldn’t be included in the release, and it is as if he just couldn’t see why that type of communication was important.

There were also instances of moderators publicly being mean to other chatters, _especially_ when asking about valid concerns in the language, like the criticism mentioned in other blog posts (specifically the “V is for Vaporware” posts). When talking to one of the other moderators, this was defended as “cultural differences”. I left the team (and was blocked by Alex) the same day that another developer left.”

Wake up and smell the coffee

Given the drama and outrage from Zig and V, I feel like the communities need a serious wake-up call: in the real world, no one cares about your small niche languages. V might take pride in being number 43 on the TIOBE index (no idea how that happened, given all the other negative trends), which places it behind such household names as ABAP and GAMS. Nor should Zig (42 on Languish) be uncorking the champagne — that’s a share of 0.18%.

Get this: no one is using your languages. You might think that because a few repos exist, your language is on the verge of a breakthrough — but face it: you don’t matter and your language doesn’t matter yet.

Maybe in the future it will. But for now, the average programmer couldn’t care less.

I care enough to actually sit down with your language and others to do a comparison. I’m writing overviews, not deep dives. Apparently this nuance is lost on language cultists — the idea that someone could simply want to write a summary for normal programmers who just want a quick look at the superficial differences.

So boo-hoo — but I won’t give preferential treatment to your cult. I don’t care, and it’s not “unfair” to treat you the same as everyone else.

So just kindly shut up.