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Congrats on Dark for making it this far! Relevent timeline: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financing/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-an

Congrats on Dark for making it this far! Relevent timeline: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financing/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019) https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today) TL;DR: We’re taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to shrink Dark’s team, and to change how we build both the product and the company." So where do we go from here? Right now, the team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years, and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the community much more in Dark’s growth, and slowly rebuild the team at a pace appropriate to the product’s maturity, focusing on a small, tight team that can wear many hats. Then there was a pivot to a rewrite of the whole thing, which I think was just Paul at the time: Start of a new rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020) Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ (2022) seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?: https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023) No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ (2024) Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which is a look at PL funding models: https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/ https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/ Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of 100 million). Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and what their funding model will be going forward.

greener_grass 1y ago
Mojo's promise is the same code, but faster. They were planning some language extensions but it's more like a compiler project than a programming language project. The truth is, most developers don't want to learn a new language. They will jump through extra hoops just to use their favorite one (e.g. Airflow). Successful languages appear when there is an extreme market demand (C++ providing OOP over C) or, more commonly, a hot new platform that people want to get in on (JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin, C#, ...) For most people, new syntax / semantics is considered a negative and there needs to be some massive upside to overcome that.
VirusNewbie 1y ago
Mojo was also less ambitious in a lot of ways. It blows my mind the Eve and Darklang guys raised so much money without a lot of momentum. I'd think you'd go the other way, start an Open Source project, spend 10+ years gaining a community and refining it, then raise money. In both of the above cases, the founders just got bored of their project before they found PMF.
- cmontella 1y ago
  You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon, because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential upside. The problem was, and this is what Paul found out too, they wanted to see typical startup metrics before they'd put more money in, and it was always going to take more than $2-3 mil. You just can't demonstrate those with a concept of a language.
  - greener_grass 1y ago
    Do you think Unison will suffer the same fate?
    - cmontella 1y ago
      No, I mean these low bus factor languages don't really die as long as the BDFL keeps working on it. Biggar keeps Dark going through thick and thin. Chiusano likewise with Unison. Even if their Unison public benefit corp runs out of money, Chiusano could probably do what Dark did and buy the IP. With my programming language I'm making sure that there is no IP and therefore nothing to own. It would probably be easy for Biggar to just wash his hand of Dark as well but it takes guts to keep going in a direction you know it right, and so I'm happy to see the project continue.
      - ChadNauseam 1y ago
        I'm glad to hear it as I'm very interested in Unison. (I've been watching them from the sidelines for ages.) For those not in the loop, it's a language where your code is stored on disk in AST form, not textually. The AST representation is smart in many ways - for example, renaming a function is an O(1) operation, regardless of how often the function is used. They also have a way to serialize Unison functions and send them over the wire to other Unison programs, which is pretty sick. Their site is here: https://www.unison-lang.org/ https://www.unison-lang.org/ (I'm mostly interested in it because I think it would be an ideal language for videogame scripting & modding)
khuey 1y ago
> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million Mozilla alone invested an eight digit amount in Rust.
- krainboltgreene 1y ago
  Meanwhile Elixir had no such backer.
  - 15155 1y ago
    Ericsson did a lot of the heavy lifting with BEAM.
    - krainboltgreene 1y ago
      The same could be said about Darklang's underling language, the browser, and javascript.
  - mtndew4brkfst 1y ago
    What do you consider the financial and developer contributions of Dashbit née Plataformatec, Dockyard, and Fly.io?
    - krainboltgreene 1y ago
      Dashbit and Fly.io were announced in 2020, Dockyard started using elixir big time in 2015~. Elixir started in 2012. Phoenix in 2015. Certainly none of those companies had millions to spend on Elixir at the time.
      - mtndew4brkfst 1y ago
        My point was that José and Chris being continuously employed working on the language and Phoenix respectively (by the companies I named) are probably considered a form of commercial backing by most people. If you want to split hairs about specific timing or magnitude of investment, that's kind of nitpicking IMO. It's not grassroots at basically any point. José founded Dashbit after Plataformatec got acquired but up until ~2020 Plat directly funded the creation and iteration of the language, with it originating as an internal research project. https://elixir-lang.org/development.html https://elixir-lang.org/development.html José Valim created Elixir in 2012 as a Research and Development project inside Plataformatec. https://plataformatec.com/ https://plataformatec.com/ Dashbit José Valim has openened a new company to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Those companies employ a useful fraction of the language core team, too.
candiddevmike 1y ago
I don't think open sourcing is going to fix their adoption issue. Like the other comments mention, you need to be worth the time investment to gain traction. If Dark was truly as revolutionary as it was marketed as, it wouldn't have had problems staying source available, IMO. Folks will pay or put up with whatever it takes to be in the ecosystem (such as CUDA).
- pbiggar 1y ago
  I agree it won't fit it, but IMO it will remove one of the barriers to adoption. The problem with doing something revolutionary, is that it's only going to be revolutionary in some ways, and it has to compete with things that are mature in ways you are not. And the original version (now called Darklang-Classic) was quite immature in an awful lot of ways that made it difficult to build on. That's being addressed with the new version of course!
duped 1y ago
> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets Which is why you should build your team in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, etc. There's a competitive advantage to hiring outside the SF tech bubble today. Over the last 5 years the network effects in SF have begun to evaporate.
- cmontella 1y ago
  Agreed in hindsight, but at the same time there was no place else where a couple of 20-somethings could grab a cup of coffee with a VC and walk away with a handshake deal for $2 million dollars. That just didn't happen in Denver et al in 2014.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    Does that still happen today? Anecdotally there has appeared to have been a massive funding crunch for pretty much anything that isn't virtual healthcare or AI since COVID passed, though I'll be the first to admit I'm not in the know on a lot of these things.
    - ChadNauseam 1y ago
      My anecdata is the opposite. I know people getting funding for non-AI projects. The most "nontraditional" one I can think of is Nautilus [0]. [0]: https://www.nautilus.quest/ https://www.nautilus.quest/
- stachudotnet 1y ago
  We (darklang) are fully remote! One person in Vermont, one in Algeria. :)
  - nand_gate 1y ago
    Must be nice making SF rates out in Algeria!
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
gkapur 1y ago
There was also Wing cloud (fka Monada) and there’s Mojo by Modular (https://www.modular.com/mojo https://www.modular.com/mojo.) Feels like two types of companies raised money: - Companies trying to couple the cloud with a programming language. - More recently, companies trying to couple GPUs with a programming language/alternative to CUDA. Will be curious how this generation goes.

greener_grass 1y ago

Mojo's promise is the same code, but faster. They were planning some language extensions but it's more like a compiler project than a programming language project. The truth is, most developers don't want to learn a new language. They will jump through extra hoops just to use their favorite one (e.g. Airflow). Successful languages appear when there is an extreme market demand (C++ providing OOP over C) or, more commonly, a hot new platform that people want to get in on (JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin, C#, ...) For most people, new syntax / semantics is considered a negative and there needs to be some massive upside to overcome that.

VirusNewbie 1y ago

Mojo was also less ambitious in a lot of ways. It blows my mind the Eve and Darklang guys raised so much money without a lot of momentum. I'd think you'd go the other way, start an Open Source project, spend 10+ years gaining a community and refining it, then raise money. In both of the above cases, the founders just got bored of their project before they found PMF.

cmontella 1y ago
You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon, because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential upside. The problem was, and this is what Paul found out too, they wanted to see typical startup metrics before they'd put more money in, and it was always going to take more than $2-3 mil. You just can't demonstrate those with a concept of a language.
- greener_grass 1y ago
  Do you think Unison will suffer the same fate?
  - cmontella 1y ago
    No, I mean these low bus factor languages don't really die as long as the BDFL keeps working on it. Biggar keeps Dark going through thick and thin. Chiusano likewise with Unison. Even if their Unison public benefit corp runs out of money, Chiusano could probably do what Dark did and buy the IP. With my programming language I'm making sure that there is no IP and therefore nothing to own. It would probably be easy for Biggar to just wash his hand of Dark as well but it takes guts to keep going in a direction you know it right, and so I'm happy to see the project continue.
    - ChadNauseam 1y ago
      I'm glad to hear it as I'm very interested in Unison. (I've been watching them from the sidelines for ages.) For those not in the loop, it's a language where your code is stored on disk in AST form, not textually. The AST representation is smart in many ways - for example, renaming a function is an O(1) operation, regardless of how often the function is used. They also have a way to serialize Unison functions and send them over the wire to other Unison programs, which is pretty sick. Their site is here: https://www.unison-lang.org/ https://www.unison-lang.org/ (I'm mostly interested in it because I think it would be an ideal language for videogame scripting & modding)

khuey 1y ago

> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million Mozilla alone invested an eight digit amount in Rust.

krainboltgreene 1y ago
Meanwhile Elixir had no such backer.
- 15155 1y ago
  Ericsson did a lot of the heavy lifting with BEAM.
  - krainboltgreene 1y ago
    The same could be said about Darklang's underling language, the browser, and javascript.
- mtndew4brkfst 1y ago
  What do you consider the financial and developer contributions of Dashbit née Plataformatec, Dockyard, and Fly.io?
  - krainboltgreene 1y ago
    Dashbit and Fly.io were announced in 2020, Dockyard started using elixir big time in 2015~. Elixir started in 2012. Phoenix in 2015. Certainly none of those companies had millions to spend on Elixir at the time.
    - mtndew4brkfst 1y ago
      My point was that José and Chris being continuously employed working on the language and Phoenix respectively (by the companies I named) are probably considered a form of commercial backing by most people. If you want to split hairs about specific timing or magnitude of investment, that's kind of nitpicking IMO. It's not grassroots at basically any point. José founded Dashbit after Plataformatec got acquired but up until ~2020 Plat directly funded the creation and iteration of the language, with it originating as an internal research project. https://elixir-lang.org/development.html https://elixir-lang.org/development.html José Valim created Elixir in 2012 as a Research and Development project inside Plataformatec. https://plataformatec.com/ https://plataformatec.com/ Dashbit José Valim has openened a new company to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Those companies employ a useful fraction of the language core team, too.

candiddevmike 1y ago

I don't think open sourcing is going to fix their adoption issue. Like the other comments mention, you need to be worth the time investment to gain traction. If Dark was truly as revolutionary as it was marketed as, it wouldn't have had problems staying source available, IMO. Folks will pay or put up with whatever it takes to be in the ecosystem (such as CUDA).

pbiggar 1y ago
I agree it won't fit it, but IMO it will remove one of the barriers to adoption. The problem with doing something revolutionary, is that it's only going to be revolutionary in some ways, and it has to compete with things that are mature in ways you are not. And the original version (now called Darklang-Classic) was quite immature in an awful lot of ways that made it difficult to build on. That's being addressed with the new version of course!

duped 1y ago

> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets Which is why you should build your team in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, etc. There's a competitive advantage to hiring outside the SF tech bubble today. Over the last 5 years the network effects in SF have begun to evaporate.

cmontella 1y ago
Agreed in hindsight, but at the same time there was no place else where a couple of 20-somethings could grab a cup of coffee with a VC and walk away with a handshake deal for $2 million dollars. That just didn't happen in Denver et al in 2014.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  Does that still happen today? Anecdotally there has appeared to have been a massive funding crunch for pretty much anything that isn't virtual healthcare or AI since COVID passed, though I'll be the first to admit I'm not in the know on a lot of these things.
  - ChadNauseam 1y ago
    My anecdata is the opposite. I know people getting funding for non-AI projects. The most "nontraditional" one I can think of is Nautilus [0]. [0]: https://www.nautilus.quest/ https://www.nautilus.quest/
stachudotnet 1y ago
We (darklang) are fully remote! One person in Vermont, one in Algeria. :)
- nand_gate 1y ago
  Must be nice making SF rates out in Algeria!
VirusNewbie 1y ago

gkapur 1y ago

There was also Wing cloud (fka Monada) and there’s Mojo by Modular (https://www.modular.com/mojo https://www.modular.com/mojo.) Feels like two types of companies raised money: - Companies trying to couple the cloud with a programming language. - More recently, companies trying to couple GPUs with a programming language/alternative to CUDA. Will be curious how this generation goes.