6 ms·

This is a great article but I really wish that somewhere on the page it said what a Dark is and why I would want one. I tried clicking homepage it wasn't there

This is a great article but I really wish that somewhere on the page it said what a Dark is and why I would want one. I tried clicking homepage it wasn't there, I tried clicking demo and it tried to open YouTube which was not what I wanted to happen, then finally I found it in the documentation section. The first sentence or two from there, maybe as a subtitle or in the intro paragraph would help I think.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
idk, I clicked Homepage and the blurb was right there. Looks like a language / environment to build serverless apps.
- kev009 6y ago
  One thing that makes it hard to grok is how large the scope seems to be and the cognitive bias many devs have developed against new platforms due to being burned in the past. It reminds me of a throwback to 90s era RADs that wanted to encompass everything for everyone without really having clear intent or at least a platform company backing them to snare enough users to become a new platform. Sometimes there are gems in the rough in things like that like Delphi, and I don't mean to dismiss any of the ideas or dreams, but IMO platform companies are going to continue to monopolize the language space (for instance, I see great irony in they are using .NET because Microsoft basically does what they are trying to do). So that's why I bring up Delphi above, it seems this could be an opinionated framework on top of a .NET language instead of yet another language?
  - seibelj 6y ago
    It looks like Dark is trying to be a new language, a backend server, a CI solution, and an IDE! Then there is a blog post that everyone churns: > Currently, we get 10 user signups a day, and on average, 0 of them stick. We do have developers who love Dark, but not enough. https://roadmap.darklang.com/goals-of-dark-v2 https://roadmap.darklang.com/goals-of-dark-v2 I think the company should focus on just one of those things and it would still be an enormous lift given their size. > The problems and fixes are across the product. One problem is that undo is slow, another is that you can't put a minus sign in front of an integer, another is that we need to define how namespaces will work in the package manager. The fixes range from adding tooltips in the UI, to adding a type-checker, to making the package manager public. https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ Ayeeeee... this is like trying to carve Mount Rushmore using a spoon.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      Also only one person is working on it - everyone else in the dev team seems to have been let go/fired. https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/
      - divtiwari 6y ago
        Lol
        pbiggar 6y ago
        Really wasn't that funny
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        It reads that there are some remaining millions of dollars, which now support a single employee. Is that a correct reading?
        pbiggar 6y ago
        A little over a million. While that should last 5 years, I expect to hire again in the new year, once I have an actual plan figured out.
        NomDePlum 6y ago
        Good luck. Better to recognise the problem and try to adjust than to just plow on.
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        Fair. Good luck :-) Happy CircleCI customer.
      - seibelj 6y ago
        Oh my goodness! This is something that I think you need a sizable open source community to build and maintain. This platform is not close to something you can rely on to build your new startup / business. I don't want to denigrate the efforts of the founders / devs but this is just an insanely huge amount of effort. Entire companies are built to just to provide a small subset of what Dark is trying to accomplish. The employees must be super stressed out! I would focus on maybe just the IDE and deployment. I don't see why you need an entire new language. I could see this being an advanced IDE to churn out server-less APIs plus some closed-source packages to provide magic. But this is just... woah!
kodah 6y ago
I spent some time last night looking at it. Just to affirm what you're saying, there's hardly any information on their frontpage unless you go venturing into videos and blog posts. Dark is basically a language that's designed to be serverless out of the box. They've baked their own engine into the language as well as dependencies for various cloud providers, databases (postgres was highlighted a lot), etc so that you can build serverless applications quickly while having no knowledge of operating systems, infrastructure, or really even computer science. It reminds me of a number of the languages out there that are low-code or no-code. A regular programmer probably wouldn't even recognize some of the syntax and symbolization this language uses. Here's some examples: https://blog.darklang.com/spin-up-a-slack-app-in-seconds-with-dark/ https://blog.darklang.com/spin-up-a-slack-app-in-seconds-wit... Most of us have probably built a Slack app by now (or bot) so this is a good example to compare with IMO. Dark has a mission of appealing to 1B people and they say the first step is to appeal to developers.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  Did you figure out what the greyed out "v1", "v4", etc. after certain calls was for? I clicked through a few pages but couldn't figure it out. Internal versioning as they release new methods on their own libraries? So it doesn't break old ones?
  - pbiggar 6y ago
    That's right, we version all stdlib functions. I talk about it a bit here: https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ When we add a new version of a function, all the calls to the old function are unchanged. The autocomplete shows new users the new version (and not the old version), while people who are calling the old version get shown both.
    - steve_adams_86 6y ago
      Is this what you refer to as feature flags in the FAQ? > Q: Deployless seems dangerous! Won't I constantly break my application? > A: ... snip ... With Dark's feature flags, you have precise control over how and when a specific feature or set of features becomes live, and for which part of your user base.
pbiggar 6y ago
Good point! I quickly updated the blog post with a blurb. Was not expecting this to be #1 on HN! > Welcome HN! If this is your first time hearing about Dark, check out the website[1], our What is Dark [2] post, and How Dark deploys in 50ms [3] to understand what we're about. Thanks for checking us out! [1] https://darklang.com https://darklang.com [2] https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/ https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/ [3] https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
DylanDmitri 6y ago
To me, the most interesting part of Dark is their dedication to tightening the feedback loop in website development. It caches recent requests to your site, and as you make changes it constantly re-runs those requests showing you the resulting live values in code. This is close to something like Excel where code changes are instantly and visually applied to the input data. There's incredible promise here, and I believe similar fast-feedback paradigms will become the mainstream programming experience within 30-40 years. We've already had a taste of this with Jupyter Notebook's ubiquity across data science; despite its many flaws it lets people iterate just a little faster. As for Dark itself, it feels they put too much emphasis on language and not enough on ecosystem. I wish they had focused on a fresh new IDE experience for Django or Rails rather than additionally building a entire language and syntax from scratch.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
> This is a great article but I really wish that somewhere on the page it said what a Dark is and why I would want one. I feel exactly the same. It looks like you have to watch some videos that explain what it is and what it's for and I don't have time. If they can't describe it in a concise paragraph then I'm not sure why I would care. Why is this ending up on the front page of HN 2 days in a row - apparently it's only because they're dropping OCaml. Ok, fine you're dropping OCaml and moving to F# for your... whatever it is.
- markburns 6y ago
  I’ve used it quite a bit and you make a valid point. The appeal it had to me was watching one of the videos in which he talks about inherent versus accidental complexity. I’d say eliminating all the extraneous accidental complexity you see in the entire process of building software is what it aims to do. That really resonated with me. Deployment, code versioning, IDEs, infrastructure. So many of these things can be replaced by a simpler holistic toolset. I’d say for simple use cases they’re well past the 80% mark. And it really is enjoyable building something in this paradigm. The challenges are obviously the next 20% which will be where all the really hard edge case parts come. I’m really looking forward to seeing it evolve. It’s worth watching the introductory talk, even if you never intend to build something with it. Accidental complexity is something I’m sure all engineers battle with. It’s nice seeing a genuine attempt to eliminate it. Even if it has ironically come along with some of its own accidental complexity. (E.g. not having enough libraries) I’m hopeful that they’ll continue to battle all the right parts of accidental complexity and stay aware (as they are) of where they’re introducing it

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

idk, I clicked Homepage and the blurb was right there. Looks like a language / environment to build serverless apps.

kev009 6y ago
One thing that makes it hard to grok is how large the scope seems to be and the cognitive bias many devs have developed against new platforms due to being burned in the past. It reminds me of a throwback to 90s era RADs that wanted to encompass everything for everyone without really having clear intent or at least a platform company backing them to snare enough users to become a new platform. Sometimes there are gems in the rough in things like that like Delphi, and I don't mean to dismiss any of the ideas or dreams, but IMO platform companies are going to continue to monopolize the language space (for instance, I see great irony in they are using .NET because Microsoft basically does what they are trying to do). So that's why I bring up Delphi above, it seems this could be an opinionated framework on top of a .NET language instead of yet another language?
- seibelj 6y ago
  It looks like Dark is trying to be a new language, a backend server, a CI solution, and an IDE! Then there is a blog post that everyone churns: > Currently, we get 10 user signups a day, and on average, 0 of them stick. We do have developers who love Dark, but not enough. https://roadmap.darklang.com/goals-of-dark-v2 https://roadmap.darklang.com/goals-of-dark-v2 I think the company should focus on just one of those things and it would still be an enormous lift given their size. > The problems and fixes are across the product. One problem is that undo is slow, another is that you can't put a minus sign in front of an integer, another is that we need to define how namespaces will work in the package manager. The fixes range from adding tooltips in the UI, to adding a type-checker, to making the package manager public. https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ Ayeeeee... this is like trying to carve Mount Rushmore using a spoon.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    Also only one person is working on it - everyone else in the dev team seems to have been let go/fired. https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/
    - divtiwari 6y ago
      Lol
      - pbiggar 6y ago
        Really wasn't that funny
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        It reads that there are some remaining millions of dollars, which now support a single employee. Is that a correct reading?
        pbiggar 6y ago
        A little over a million. While that should last 5 years, I expect to hire again in the new year, once I have an actual plan figured out.
        NomDePlum 6y ago
        Good luck. Better to recognise the problem and try to adjust than to just plow on.
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        Fair. Good luck :-) Happy CircleCI customer.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      Oh my goodness! This is something that I think you need a sizable open source community to build and maintain. This platform is not close to something you can rely on to build your new startup / business. I don't want to denigrate the efforts of the founders / devs but this is just an insanely huge amount of effort. Entire companies are built to just to provide a small subset of what Dark is trying to accomplish. The employees must be super stressed out! I would focus on maybe just the IDE and deployment. I don't see why you need an entire new language. I could see this being an advanced IDE to churn out server-less APIs plus some closed-source packages to provide magic. But this is just... woah!

kodah 6y ago

I spent some time last night looking at it. Just to affirm what you're saying, there's hardly any information on their frontpage unless you go venturing into videos and blog posts. Dark is basically a language that's designed to be serverless out of the box. They've baked their own engine into the language as well as dependencies for various cloud providers, databases (postgres was highlighted a lot), etc so that you can build serverless applications quickly while having no knowledge of operating systems, infrastructure, or really even computer science. It reminds me of a number of the languages out there that are low-code or no-code. A regular programmer probably wouldn't even recognize some of the syntax and symbolization this language uses. Here's some examples: https://blog.darklang.com/spin-up-a-slack-app-in-seconds-with-dark/ https://blog.darklang.com/spin-up-a-slack-app-in-seconds-wit... Most of us have probably built a Slack app by now (or bot) so this is a good example to compare with IMO. Dark has a mission of appealing to 1B people and they say the first step is to appeal to developers.

mattmanser 6y ago
Did you figure out what the greyed out "v1", "v4", etc. after certain calls was for? I clicked through a few pages but couldn't figure it out. Internal versioning as they release new methods on their own libraries? So it doesn't break old ones?
- pbiggar 6y ago
  That's right, we version all stdlib functions. I talk about it a bit here: https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ When we add a new version of a function, all the calls to the old function are unchanged. The autocomplete shows new users the new version (and not the old version), while people who are calling the old version get shown both.
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    Is this what you refer to as feature flags in the FAQ? > Q: Deployless seems dangerous! Won't I constantly break my application? > A: ... snip ... With Dark's feature flags, you have precise control over how and when a specific feature or set of features becomes live, and for which part of your user base.

pbiggar 6y ago

Good point! I quickly updated the blog post with a blurb. Was not expecting this to be #1 on HN! > Welcome HN! If this is your first time hearing about Dark, check out the website[1], our What is Dark [2] post, and How Dark deploys in 50ms [3] to understand what we're about. Thanks for checking us out! [1] https://darklang.com https://darklang.com [2] https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/ https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/ [3] https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/

DylanDmitri 6y ago

To me, the most interesting part of Dark is their dedication to tightening the feedback loop in website development. It caches recent requests to your site, and as you make changes it constantly re-runs those requests showing you the resulting live values in code. This is close to something like Excel where code changes are instantly and visually applied to the input data. There's incredible promise here, and I believe similar fast-feedback paradigms will become the mainstream programming experience within 30-40 years. We've already had a taste of this with Jupyter Notebook's ubiquity across data science; despite its many flaws it lets people iterate just a little faster. As for Dark itself, it feels they put too much emphasis on language and not enough on ecosystem. I wish they had focused on a fresh new IDE experience for Django or Rails rather than additionally building a entire language and syntax from scratch.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

> This is a great article but I really wish that somewhere on the page it said what a Dark is and why I would want one. I feel exactly the same. It looks like you have to watch some videos that explain what it is and what it's for and I don't have time. If they can't describe it in a concise paragraph then I'm not sure why I would care. Why is this ending up on the front page of HN 2 days in a row - apparently it's only because they're dropping OCaml. Ok, fine you're dropping OCaml and moving to F# for your... whatever it is.

markburns 6y ago
I’ve used it quite a bit and you make a valid point. The appeal it had to me was watching one of the videos in which he talks about inherent versus accidental complexity. I’d say eliminating all the extraneous accidental complexity you see in the entire process of building software is what it aims to do. That really resonated with me. Deployment, code versioning, IDEs, infrastructure. So many of these things can be replaced by a simpler holistic toolset. I’d say for simple use cases they’re well past the 80% mark. And it really is enjoyable building something in this paradigm. The challenges are obviously the next 20% which will be where all the really hard edge case parts come. I’m really looking forward to seeing it evolve. It’s worth watching the introductory talk, even if you never intend to build something with it. Accidental complexity is something I’m sure all engineers battle with. It’s nice seeing a genuine attempt to eliminate it. Even if it has ironically come along with some of its own accidental complexity. (E.g. not having enough libraries) I’m hopeful that they’ll continue to battle all the right parts of accidental complexity and stay aware (as they are) of where they’re introducing it