This is ordinarily something I'd write on my blog, and I might still, but I'm feeling cautious for reasons that will become clear.
It's often said that we live in a "post-truth" society. This is usually said in the context of politics, fake reviews, etc., and is adjacent to discussions of disinformation, also often connected to the threat of deepfakes and the potential of large language models to produce persuasive text. Even in science there is a replication crisis, and a disturbing amount of straight-up fraud, as documented by Dr. Elisabeth Bik and friends. But it's far more unusual for a programming language to be so characterized. Meet V.
The programming language space is known for passionate discussions which often come down to values, because the space is one of tradeoffs. Want safety (which I believe is related to religious-like concepts of purity and contamination)? Sure, but you have to decide whether you're willing to give up performance or simplicity.
V, by contrast, pretends there is no tradeoff. You can have it all, thanks to the cleverness of its creator. There just a few bugs (as do all projects!) and they'll be fixed in the next release.
All this would be great if it were true. And, in fact, I have no problem with an idealistic young person with a shaky grasp of programming language theory setting out to make the next Great Language, or even setting up a Patreon for that. I'd contribute! It's the lies.
My readers (here) will believe me, but on the open Internet I would have to deal with the V fan club. V has popped up several times, often in HN threads, and each time it attracts claims it's a scam. The most famous one is Andy Kelley (creator of Zig), who said in dramatic tone, "This guy is a complete fraud."
Another scathing review was V is for Vaporware by Xe Iaso. Similar discussion on HN.
More recently, an extremely even-handed (but anonymous) review, carefully documenting (in easily verified form) that the language in its current state doesn't come anywhere near close to delivering on its promises.
In all of these, a curious narrative develops. Yes, V is early on in its development, so it has flaws, but these reviews overstate them because they are competitors, presumably grubbing for the same Patreon money. Criticisms are toxic and divisive. These narratives are actually quite close to those of other nascent but still unpopular languages.
All projects have ambitions that go beyond their current state, and some are not exactly clear in communicating the difference. But the main reason I am confident using language like "deception" is that disclaimers were publicly added to the project site in response to criticism, then quietly removed later. It is implausible to me these later changes were made in good faith.
Most recently there was a fairly big HN thread on the 0.3 release. Defenders of the language, including the creator (amedvednikov) engaged in a wide range of post-truth behavior. I am an amateur Internet sociologist. I am fascinated.
The most distinctive post-truth technique is saying stuff that simply isn't true, even better, easily verified to be false. I believe this is a form of victim-filtering. The majority of people won't check any such claims, and those that do are not good marks for the scam. In this case, the most egregious claims were that the defects found in the anonymous review had all been fixed. It takes less than a minute to verify that this is not true at all, which I pointed out.
The other major post-truth technique is accusing critics of various forms of bad faith, divisiveness. One recurring theme is that criticism should be directed as bug reports. A critical blog post is an attack. A common theme is deflecting attention away from the substance of the criticism (which is solid) and toward the tone and motivations.
I barely even mention whataboutism, which is a staple of post-truth.
I am honestly confused as to the motivations of the language creator, and even more so the community. In most cases of post-truth, it's not hard to figure out the reason. Most often they're either pushing a political position, selling something, or both. In this case, it's directing a very modest amount of money to the author's Patreon so he can continue developing an open source project. If you're scamming, there are much more lucrative targets (NFT, ahem), and if you want to work on an open source language, why the deception?
I am not a real doctor, but my best guess is that the developer is a programming language enthusiast who also happens to be a pathological liar, much the same way a particular file system was developed by a murderer, or antivirus developer whose murdering was probably not his biggest problem. But ultimately I don't know, and I don't think it matters much.
I'm pretty much done with post-truth, and refuse to acknowledge its power. I'm ready for a "return to truth," and think there are positive steps one can take in this direction, particularly being more careful of sources of information, and aware of post-truth techniques.
In this particular case, I was impressed by the mawfig (anonymous) review, as it focused on verifiable claims, clearly identified more subjective topics or matters of opinion, and basically just made its point. I sense an ally in the desire to return to truth.
4chan-like comment boards, including Reddit and HN, are not a good place to discern truth. I sometimes enjoy the drama, and have some productive conversations, but overall one should proceed with care.
Lastly, it's a good reminder that some rhetorical modes, especially tone-policing, appeals for civility, isolated demands for rigor, and especially whataboutism, should be tuned out. I'm sure there are some sincere appeals against divisiveness, but it's just as easily abused by a bad-faith actor.
I don't think deepfakes and LLMs change the equation much, though likely they will make it more economically effective to run sock-puppet campaigns. If you're gullible to fall for post-truth argumentation by humans, you'll fall for the new stuff, and vice versa.