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Comment by md5person | Hacker News Reader

Who is this for exactly?

I don't see how the target can be entirely non-technical people, since this still assumes some knowledge around databases/functions/REST/HTTP/Schemas/etc.

Technical people have very little reason to use this, since this platform is a walled garden of proprietary tooling, and there's only so much you can achieve with abstractions and fancy ORM. You won't be able to break out of the mould when the time comes, so why waste your time in the first place? Do it right the first time and maintain your flexibility and freedom later on.

I believe the only remaining target audience here is technically-inclined people that want to build a cheap prototype quickly, just to test ideas. This is a playground basically.

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There is a large - and growing - population of technically-minded people who understand the core concepts you're referring to (REST APIs, databases, HTTP, etc) and have ideas or needs for applications, but don't have the experience required to build non-naive implementations of their ideas.

Moving the bar on "high-level programming" up a few notches to remove even more of the plumbing required to build and launch an app is only a good thing in my mind. It provides more options for more people.

Dark definitely won't be for everyone, but it seems to me like it will empower a lot of people to bring their ideas to reality more easily than before.

> "Dark definitely won't be for everyone, but it seems to me like it will empower a lot of people to bring their ideas to reality more easily than before."

I agree.

> "There is a large - and growing - population of technically-minded people who understand the core concepts you're referring to (REST APIs, databases, HTTP, etc) and have ideas or needs for applications, but don't have the experience required to build non-naive implementations of their ideas."

Sure, but one could argue the Darklang approach is actually not that far from a "naive implementation" of those ideas. There's only so much you can do with prefab code and lock-in tooling. There's definitely a market for "Wix for SaaS software", but does Darklang strike the right balance?

To your last point, I think we'll have to wait and see?

Funny that you bring up Wix, I was thinking of that comparison too earlier..

In the early days, we had Geocities, Angelfire and other hosted web publishing sites where people could tinker with the CSS and images and post their content.

Then came Wix and Squarespace and the like, where you could also edit the HTML and start to add some functionality..

Now we have Darklang where you can write code as well..

Each one targetted the level of sophistication of the current generation of digital natives who wanted to build something for themselves on the web.

And each one is likely a stepping stone along the way for those who want to keep learning and have more power and control as they build more sophisticated things.

> Dark definitely won't be for everyone, but it seems to me like it will empower a lot of people to bring their ideas to reality more easily than before.

That is, after they learn a new programming language, error handling concept, a new IDE, and a proprietary data store.

But yes, after that it's almost drag-and-drop!

I don't recall saying it would be easy or trivial..

But those concepts you listed are certainly more straightforward (and aligned with "building an app") than dev ops, hosting, deployment, scaling, database config, etc..

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