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I wrote a short essay on this four years ago, here: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/NoSilverBullet.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/NoSilverBullet.html The gis

I wrote a short essay on this four years ago, here: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/NoSilverBullet.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/NoSilverBullet.html The gist of it is that although Brooks was correct when he wrote No Silver Bullet, since then there's been an enormous increase in accidental complexity and, if that is recognized and removed, an order of magnitude improvement is now possible.

dang 7y ago
That is an interesting twist on the argument.
breck 7y ago
This is a very good point. The Tree Notation ecosystem I work on (https://treenotation.org https://treenotation.org), would only have been an incremental improvement back 30 years ago. But now 1) cruft has accumulated and 2) there are new opportunities to exploit Tree Notation thanks to machine learning (for program synthesis, amongst other things) and visual programming, so the benefits at this time could hit that 10x number.
pbiggar 7y ago
That's also the pitch for Dark (https://darklang.com https://darklang.com)! Great minds think alike
- breck 7y ago
  When are we gonna see something?
  - pbiggar 7y ago
    Soon! Releasing some videos on Sep 16th, and release party at Strangeloop on Sep 13th.
- dkersten 7y ago
  I still can't figure out what Dark is actually about. You seem to focus more on how fast it is to deploy than on what it is, how it works, how you use it, what it looks like or how its different from previous attempts (eg Eve). I'm a bit confused by this since deployment really has never been a particularly large pain point for me (setting up the actual infrastructure has always been a much bigger pain that actually deploying, plus typically I set deployment up once with CI and then don't have to think about it again), certainly not compared to actually creating complex software in the first place. You talk about why you built Dark, but I can't find anything about what it is you actually built. Am I missing an important blog post or page or something?
  - pbiggar 7y ago
    We've been positioning around the deploy a bit recently cause people got really excited by it, but that's not really what Dark is about. Dark is about removing all accidental complexity from coding, starting with backends. That's pretty vague, but that's honestly how it started: this shit is too hard, what can we do to remove all this shitty stuff that we do. Setting up infra is one of the three areas that we think is really shit, and that's a large part of Dark. You don't have to deal with infra at all (including DBs, queues, etc); it's all built-in. Speed of deployment doesn't bother some people, esp those with smaller projects; on big teams it's a massive problem. People got excited about deployless in dark because it seemed like it had a credible vision for how it could be reduced. We been talking about why we built cause we haven't finished building it yet. We're announcing our move to "private beta" (from "private alpha") on Sep 16th, so that's the kind of stage we're at. We'll be showing how Dark works then.

dang 7y ago

That is an interesting twist on the argument.

breck 7y ago

This is a very good point. The Tree Notation ecosystem I work on (https://treenotation.org https://treenotation.org), would only have been an incremental improvement back 30 years ago. But now 1) cruft has accumulated and 2) there are new opportunities to exploit Tree Notation thanks to machine learning (for program synthesis, amongst other things) and visual programming, so the benefits at this time could hit that 10x number.

pbiggar 7y ago

That's also the pitch for Dark (https://darklang.com https://darklang.com)! Great minds think alike

breck 7y ago
When are we gonna see something?
- pbiggar 7y ago
  Soon! Releasing some videos on Sep 16th, and release party at Strangeloop on Sep 13th.
dkersten 7y ago
I still can't figure out what Dark is actually about. You seem to focus more on how fast it is to deploy than on what it is, how it works, how you use it, what it looks like or how its different from previous attempts (eg Eve). I'm a bit confused by this since deployment really has never been a particularly large pain point for me (setting up the actual infrastructure has always been a much bigger pain that actually deploying, plus typically I set deployment up once with CI and then don't have to think about it again), certainly not compared to actually creating complex software in the first place. You talk about why you built Dark, but I can't find anything about what it is you actually built. Am I missing an important blog post or page or something?
- pbiggar 7y ago
  We've been positioning around the deploy a bit recently cause people got really excited by it, but that's not really what Dark is about. Dark is about removing all accidental complexity from coding, starting with backends. That's pretty vague, but that's honestly how it started: this shit is too hard, what can we do to remove all this shitty stuff that we do. Setting up infra is one of the three areas that we think is really shit, and that's a large part of Dark. You don't have to deal with infra at all (including DBs, queues, etc); it's all built-in. Speed of deployment doesn't bother some people, esp those with smaller projects; on big teams it's a massive problem. People got excited about deployless in dark because it seemed like it had a credible vision for how it could be reduced. We been talking about why we built cause we haven't finished building it yet. We're announcing our move to "private beta" (from "private alpha") on Sep 16th, so that's the kind of stage we're at. We'll be showing how Dark works then.