V is a new programming language that is widely reviled in the
programming language community, but appears fairly popular among the
broader population.  What gives?  The following in my own analysis.

The root cause is that V initially made some promises that seemed
completely unrealistic (automatically translating any C or C++ program
to V) and some that are arguably impossible (leak-free memory
management with no garbage collector, no reference counting, and no
complex static analysis). When V was eventually released, the
implementation fell very short of these goals.

The above is by itself not unusual. On the /r/ProgrammingLanguages
subrettit alone you can find many languages that wish to change the
world or have some completely unrealistic feature set, yet end up
going nowhere - and none of those become the target of mockery. I
think the main difference is that V made it sound like it already
supported things that were nowhere near done (and this is continuing
to this day), but more importantly, became really successful before it
was even released. It got an enormous amount of stars on GitHub and
the author received a lot of funding on Patreon.

V's author often says that the reason for the persistent criticism is
sheer jealously. There is some truth to this, but it's the kind of
jealous indignation that comes from seeing a con artist achieve
success that seems undeserved. Some of the most savage early criticism
came from people surrounding existing languages that try to replace
C/C++ - not just Rust, but also languages such as Zig. These people
know that the things V tries to do are very difficult, and they spent
years trying to do them (and arguably have still not succeeded). It is
perfectly natural to be upset when some other language shows up and
sucks all the oxygen out of the room, based on nothing but empty
promises and slick marketing. It feels undeserved and unfair. I think
that is the reason for the sheer vitriol you see in some of the early
V criticism.

These are harsh words, but early V was definitely a completely
amateurish implementation made by someone who had no idea of the
difficulty of what he was attempting to do, yet made it sound like it
was all completely done. The programming language community has lots
of tolerance for hopeless dreamers with impossible goals (because we
are all like that), but it has little patience for outright
dishonesty. As a result, V became a bit of an in-joke - a
representative of a something so terrible that its mere existence
became comedic. Most enthusiast communities have such things. V is the
Star Was Holiday Special of our community.

Things may have changed now, but based on the recent review[0] I don't
think so. The V designer keeps saying that these are just bugs and
some/all are fixed in the newest release, but these classes of bugs
still look rooted in fundamental misconceptions about how programming
languages are supposed to work. E.g. the memory leaks seem based in
the fact that string constants seem to be special-cased in the memory
management implementation. Maybe this has been fixed now, but no
competent language implementer should have used that design in the
first place.

So basically, V burnt its entire goodwill budget before it was even
released, and the releases have just enforced the idea that it is all
style and little substance, while remaining somewhat popular. This
popularity feels "undeserved" in some emotional and frankly irrational
way, since people can like what they want. But we are humans, and
sometimes we just have gut feelings of unfairness.

V is the PHP3 of systems programming languages.

[0]: https://mawfig.github.io/2022/06/18/v-lang-in-2022.html