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.
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-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.
Internal versioning as they release new methods on their own libraries? So it doesn't break old ones?
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.
> 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.
Hope it works out!
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.
> 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 [2] https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/ [3] https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/
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.
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
> 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
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/
Ayeeeee... this is like trying to carve Mount Rushmore using a spoon.
Happy CircleCI customer.
Dark definitely is ambitious and you're entitled to be skeptical. Personally, I'm really glad this isn't just a fancy IDE on top of a conventional stack. I think we should be doing everything we can to support loonshots and crazy new ideas like this because these are the kinds of things that could change the game for all of us.
I remember communicating with Ellen (the co-founder that has left the company) back in April (2 months before they let everyone go) when they asked for feedback. I said pretty much the gist of this blog post and received a one line answer of 'well, that's like, your opinion, maaan'.
I should feel vindicated, instead I feel sad. Dark got 3.5 million in funding - I'd be very curious to know where that money went (specifically how much the founder and co-founder have paid themselves) because it sure sounds like the founders got to 'try ocaml lol' with 3.5 million of someone else's money and then write blog posts about it that routinely show up on HackerNews, telling the rest of us of their 'lessons learned'.
Without knowing anything regarding the specific details, I would be pretty surprised if investors wouldn't be ready for both ups and downs.