On the other hand, while that model went great for Docker the technology, it has not gone well for Docker the business. I imagine Dark might see Docker as a cautionary tale of why _not_ to go down that road.
Had Kubernetes not existed they would be doing just fine economically as they would be the dominant platform.
They got beat by competition.
By the way, it's "per se"
Docker allowed reproducibility to be accomplished by a person who likes the idea of it, but will shelve it if it doesn't work within an evening. This describes me, for example. I think it took off for that reason.
They also benefited significantly from the splash they made and the tech excitement factor. I still run into people in my consulting work that are fairly new to containers, but brand recognition on Docker is through the roof. Everybody has heard of them even if they don't know what it can do for them.
Yep I agree. I recently helped a customer to move from Docker EE to OpenShift. They were frank about the pain points they experienced and why they were moving. It really came down to competition. K8s solves the problems they were having in a better way. Now with so much momentum behind K8s, nearly everybody is re-platforming their offerings on top of K8s.
I don't really think this matters. Dark is intending to be "batteries included" and relieve developers of the need for a huge ecosystem with multiple libraries for everything.
> And yet they're asking their customers to make the same bet on their proprietary language and platform.
I always use very popular open-source stacks.
That said, if given the choice between a tiny FOSS language and a tiny proprietary one (that might be profitable), I'll always choose the latter.
Small languages are extremely vulnerable to extinction regardless of who maintains them. But if at least one person's full-time job is to maintain a language, I feel much more confident than if 1-5 people are maintaining it part-time.
If it's actually going to be 'batteries included' in any meaningful way, then it will have to piggy-back off of one or more of these 'huge ecosystems', which invariably leads to the ability to integrate external pieces of these systems when needed. Which just makes it a wrapper around existing 'huge ecosystems'.
There's a reason why established languages such as Java, C#, C++, JavaScript, etc. have multiple libraries for the same problem - these libraries have different features, tradeoffs, designs etc. Same reason why existing projects get forked and new projects get started. Same reason these 'huge ecosystems' have frameworks, design patterns, idioms, best practices, etc. Competition, innovation, new designs, new ways of solving existing problems is a good thing.
I don't see dark as anything more than a very new framework, with lofty promises and zero evidence towards the idea that it will be better than existing systems in any way.
> Small languages are extremely vulnerable to extinction regardless of who maintains them. But if at least one person's full-time job is to maintain a language, I feel much more confident than if 1-5 people are maintaining it part-time.
A tiny FOSS language at least has a chance of getting some maintenance/bug fixes from the community. What happens when your proprietary language dies for lack of traction? Also, nothing prevents a person working full-time on a FOSS language.
(Not to put words in parent poster's mouth, just for reader clarity)
F# is no more proprietary than Rust. F# was started by Microsoft Research but is now an open source language 'owned' by the F# Foundation and licensed under the MIT license (https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp).
(The historical Visual F# compiler was developed by Microsoft per http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fs...) but AFAIK today Microsoft's small full-time F# devtools team work on contributions to the open-source compiler in addition to their work on VS tooling.
It's a fun language to work in, with some neat features, but C# is gobbling up every compelling advantage inexorably.
Also Microsoft alongside Facebook is looking for ex-Mozillans to join their Rust teams, then what?
That said, this item from the FAQ is nice to see; I'd love to see more vendors not just making promises along these lines, but making them binding:
> if the worst should happen, we will open-source Dark ... We're committed to codifying the specifics in a legal framework
Instead of lockin, you can run serverless in your own framework though, such as Kubeless or Knative, which could be deployed on prem or in a more generic cloud deployment.
I guess if you've got a large enough environment that you have dedicated devs pushing things to Kubeless/Knative instances maintained by dedicated ops/sysdmins, then maybe that's the niche there?
Is it solely about the developer experience? Or is it about the economic ownership of hardware? Or both?
Sorry, but this is no Clojure. Instead of a proper comment syntax you define a dummy variable to a string? Ghetto.
OCaml is a fine language, but it's not a wildly popular one. Should the authors have started with, say, Python or JS, they won't have the problem with support from third parties. Please note how their choice was between open-source Rust and proprietary (CORRECTION: also open-source already) F#, both descendants of the ML family.
When you pick a language and start to feel you're overgrowing its ecosystem, you either migrate off of it (as in the post), or start developing it to help it move in the direction you want. In the case of OCaml, Jane Street and Facebook chose the latter route.
UPDATE: Thanks for reminding that F# has been open-sourced: https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/
What do you mean. The whole page talks about "I" and "me". That's going to go well...