Darklang Goes Open Source
blog.darklang.com
blog.darklang.com
> In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.
Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.
Can someone with more business sense than me explain this? Why would employees want to buy an 8 year old product with no traction? At face value this sounds like a "holding the bag" scenario, not?
Only if they are buying it for what the investors had already put into it, which is not likely. They most likely discussed how much the investors values physical assets and trademarks the company holds (like how much they are likely to get back in a bankruptcy) plus whatever makes a deal fair and maintain a happy cordial relationship with said investors for future endeavors.
Basically, the investors lost interest but the team is passionate and see a path to success. They won't be maintaining the old product, they're going in new direction.
The founder lost interest, he started a new company and he is the CEO of it!
> To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to continue building what we regard as an important technology, Dark Inc has sold the assets – the Darklang language, the blog, the hosted service, the Discord, etc, darklang.com, etc – to a new company started by Dark Inc's former employees.
(from https://blog.darklang.com/goodbye-dark-inc-welcome-darklang-...)
In other words, there's a new company (Darklang Inc.) that has purchased the assets of Dark Inc. (for probably relatively little money). This clears the cap table, making it easier for the former employees (now founders) to raise money for the new corporation.
They want to maintain the community they have because it's the real asset for any open-source project, which is the direction they're betting on.
They sold the company because they didn't see a future of growth, and the employees were notified of the sale of the company just a couple of days before.
The new owner then fired most of the employees, it's an Italian "tech company" (Bending Spoons) which already bough companies like Evernote, Brightcove or WeTransfer, and has nothing to do with the outdoors.
Komoot was the best outdoor-community app in Germany and very popular in Europe, made mostly for hiking and biking.
You can see in this really moving video, made by the employees after they got fired, how much they loved their team:
As far as I know, this pattern is not uncommon among traditional businesses. King Arthur Flour Company is the largest one that comes to my mind, but on a local level; grocery stores, restaurants, mechanic shops, plumbing businesses, etc very often "change ownership" this way.
In software, it's pretty common in informal OSS project to transition ownership this way when the original owner/author loses interest or is otherwise unable to maintain the project.
In terms of commercial sortware, something like SketchUp comes to mind, though it's not exact path. It was a startup, acquired by Google, then spun off again with its employees
Also looks like it required their cloud setup to run, you previously couldn't run it locally. Now you can, so I think it's moving in the right direction!
Making hard connections between the editor and the lang was interesting also. Seems like they have moved away from that.
Hope there is a easy way to set it up locally, i was really intrigued when they first launched
The issue with the hard connection between the editor and language is that each change becomes a massive undertaking. Making a language improvement was much much much simpler than making the editor change to support it.
How are the deployless senario now? Where you first serve only yourself then your team, then beta, then everyone... Or something similar to that. I really liked how that story was told and how much complexity it removed
Dark's structure editor looked promising. I'm really disappointed that the project moved away from this because a hosted visual programming environment felt like the whole value proposition in the first place.
Was it the pivot to AI that killed this, was it issues with the design of the language or was the structure editor just not as useful as it seemed?
On a personal note, I'm curious around the move to F# as the implementing language and wonder if there will be ports to other languages now that it's open source.
(Or, it works something like this. The documentation is hard to understand; I'm working mostly on memory from their keynote)
Can someone explain the practical problems this is solving better than existing tools like Python or other backend stacks?
Also, genuine question: how was the team able to work on this for 2+ years without revenue or traction? Was there still funding left, or was this a side project during that time?
Many moons ago I had tried to play with Dark and unfortunately the surrounding language stuff really didn't work out for me though. I really liked the concept but ultimately I think I would have preferred if they had just built out the environment on some other language.
Even just lua would work decently well for their use cases, if paired with a good "standard" library.
The UI was fun to use, in any case.
EDIT: to be clear I'm a bit of a type weenie but for the stuff Dark could be good with you really sometimes just want to look at the JSON and poke at it, and your type systems aren't going to be helping you _that much_
You could be taking webhook values from some external service that starts passing in unknown values. That service's documentation might just be outright wrong about its behavior. But you don't have to play post-mortem forensics, as you can hold onto information.
This can be valuable for one-offs where you don't mind breakage, with relatively low request coutns and "time to fix" is what you're optimizing rather than general uptime/downtime. So some silly discord bot could work off of this, but you probably don't want your B2B SaaS being in cowboy mode.
Sometimes you want a thing that just does something and you don't care about how busted it is, but you want it to be _very easy_ to fix up issues you do care about.
Goodbye Dark, Inc. – Welcome Darklang, Inc
Turns out, the messy bits are the things that turn your vibe coded Twitter clone into a full time operations job…
Not blaming. Not everyone is good at everything or wants to make time for it.
But a good, well structured landing page with great, real life, examples and good hierarchy backed by awesome docs will make a ton of difference adoption wise. I hope.
Relevent timeline:
https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019)
https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today)
TL;DR: We’re taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to shrink Dark’s team, and to change how we build both the product and the company."
So where do we go from here? Right now, the team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years, and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the community much more in Dark’s growth, and slowly rebuild the team at a pace appropriate to the product’s maturity, focusing on a small, tight team that can wear many hats.
Start of a new rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020)
Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ (2022)
seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?: https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023)
No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ (2024)
Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which is a look at PL funding models:
https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/
Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of 100 million).
Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and what their funding model will be going forward.
They were planning some language extensions but it's more like a compiler project than a programming language project.
The truth is, most developers don't want to learn a new language.
They will jump through extra hoops just to use their favorite one (e.g. Airflow).
Successful languages appear when there is an extreme market demand (C++ providing OOP over C) or, more commonly, a hot new platform that people want to get in on (JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin, C#, ...)
For most people, new syntax / semantics is considered a negative and there needs to be some massive upside to overcome that.
In both of the above cases, the founders just got bored of their project before they found PMF.
(I'm mostly interested in it because I think it would be an ideal language for videogame scripting & modding)
Maybe the editor can load text and do structured editing. Maybe the runtime can send functions across the network. Great. But not using Git for storage and review is just too alien for most teams to even consider.
Doesn't this result in vendor lock-in for editing the code?
Mozilla alone invested an eight digit amount in Rust.
Elixir started in 2012. Phoenix in 2015. Certainly none of those companies had millions to spend on Elixir at the time.
José founded Dashbit after Plataformatec got acquired but up until ~2020 Plat directly funded the creation and iteration of the language, with it originating as an internal research project.
https://elixir-lang.org/development.html
José Valim created Elixir in 2012 as a Research and Development project inside Plataformatec.
Dashbit José Valim has openened a new company to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production.
Those companies employ a useful fraction of the language core team, too.
That's being addressed with the new version of course!
Which is why you should build your team in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, etc. There's a competitive advantage to hiring outside the SF tech bubble today. Over the last 5 years the network effects in SF have begun to evaporate.
If that's "make or break" for you, then something is wrong. There are plenty of reasons to want to have a distributed workforce (larger talent pool in general, passionate employees) but saving money is the least important one here.
Feels like two types of companies raised money: - Companies trying to couple the cloud with a programming language. - More recently, companies trying to couple GPUs with a programming language/alternative to CUDA.
Will be curious how this generation goes.