Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

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

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?

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

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.

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/

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!

Large teams/communities can build good software but I'd argue that great software is created by small teams and by massively talented and motivated individuals. Those are the contexts where people are more open to seeing beyond the incremental improvements towards new paradigms and previously unimagined possibilities.

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.

Lol

Really wasn't that funny

It reads that there are some remaining millions of dollars, which now support a single employee. Is that a correct reading?

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.

Good luck. Better to recognise the problem and try to adjust than to just plow on.

Fair. Good luck :-)

Happy CircleCI customer.

> To put it more bluntly, we have been focusing on growth of a product that has not yet reached product-market fit.

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'.

I interviewed at Dark and spoke with Paul and Ellen. I was pretty impressed by how forthright they were. If you were going to score startups about how clueless they were and how unqualified to gamble with other people money, I would put them near the bottom.

Quite a shitty accusation, isn't it?

Without knowing anything regarding the specific details, I would be pretty surprised if investors wouldn't be ready for both ups and downs.

are you accusing them of stealing money without any proof?

So no product marker fit and apparently no clear idea who the customer is. On the road to failure unfortunately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com