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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

Lots of folks asking exactly what Dark is so answering separately.

tl;dr Dark is a programming language and service. Our goal is to allow you to build backends without having to deal with the endless accidental complexity in software today. (Accidental complexity meaning everything from infrastructure and storage, to syntax errors, etc).

What does that mean exactly? Dark is a language, and editor and a PaaS, combined. We're aiming to allow you build an application in an afternoon.

One thing to bear in mind: we are very early on this, so it's buggy and doesn't have all the featured you'd need. This will literally be our first user, so set your expectations from that :)

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Will it be possible to deploy Dark apps outside your platform? I don't mind paying for the language and SDK. We already do that for Visual Studio and C#. But being locked in your PaaS forever is a nonstarter.

While it's hard to say how the business will go, that's not really the goal. We're trying to make coding much much easier, and the tight integration is part of that.

Heh, so, $3000 for 1 month of alpha testing your buggy product, essentially... or roughly $19 an hour?

Not to mention it's in SF, which puts it around the poverty line. With that money you'd have to eat rice&beans and noodles for a month to alpha test a product.

Adopting a new language with no ecosystem of libraries seems like a hard way to build useful applications. Or does Dark build upon an existing ecosystem like Elixir and Erlang? Dark's feature set reminds me a lot of Erlang.

We're mindful of this. Our goal is making coding much easier, and obviously that will need libraries. Our plan is that in the early days we'll make it very clear what Dark is useful for, and what's outside of its capabilities.

Cool. I read through your papers on SSA and FFIs for scripting languages, so I'm sure Dark will have an interesting approach on these issues. :)

you can get a lot more people to try the language if you make closed beta

Yes! this is the first step of many. We are definitely not ready for a beta yet, even a closed one.

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