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Show HN: Darklang

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Re: Show HN: Darklang

#181

Post by quickthrower2 »

edro wrote: post #11

I've been impressed with Dark -- it has the potential to make it possible to build a scalable cloud application in an afternoon and reduce application complexity. This has a number of impacts long-term, from both making existing teams more productive, to bringing less sophisticated developers to participate in application development. I highly recommend you check it out. [Disclosure - I'm an investor in the company,…

Good on you for the disclosure - but anything good you say is going to be ignored because of it :-)

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#182

Post by tnolet »

pbiggar wrote: post #172
tnolet wrote: post #163

What scares me is that their whole site doesn't mention the word "security" once. Also "testing" is in the FAQ as a "we're working on it"-item.

The FAQ mentions security. We've been working with a security consultant for over a year. One of the reasons we're in private beta is that we need to get security right before we're generally available.

No, it does not. The word is not used anywhere on the page. There is a mention about privacy, PII, GDPR, Audit logs etc. and how that's not implemented yet. If that's what you meant, fair enough.

Still a bit scared for your initial beta users running their business on this as mentioned elsewhere.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#183

Post by cuddlecake »

eternalny1 wrote: post #114
pbiggar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do intend the HN audience to love this too. Our target audience is developers building backends. We don't expect we'll wrestle people from their Emacs, so we're definitely not targeting all possible developers today, but definitely developers.

> Our target audience is developers building backends. Why wouldn't developers building back-ends just continue building back-ends in their preferred language and environments? I type this as I'm tabbed out of Visual Studio creating API back-end in C# .Net Core right now. It's easy. With this I'd have to 1) Learn a new language 2) Learn a new GUI interface for that language 3) Lock myself in

... buuuuut you don't have to learn how to:

1) deploy your code 2) deploy your datastore 3) manage your datastore 4) shard your datastore 5) deploy your infrastructur3

Among many other things. The value of Dark Lang lies not just in the programming language and the IDE, but in the holistic experience for backend development it provides, since _all_ of the overhead required to actually move to production and make new releases completely vanishes.

Reducing the entire idea of darklang to "vendor lock in, lol naw" is missing the point, but also kind of nailing it.

By reducing options, you gain the freedom to focus on the problem you set out to solve in the first place.

Of course, it's not a silver bullet right now, but it's an interesting bullet nonetheless.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#184

Post by mapcars »

pbiggar wrote: post #28
braythwayt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like HN regular are unlikely to be the ideal audience for this. Reaching for a metaphor, it's like a bunch of expert Unix users gathering around an IBM PC or Macintosh in the 1980s. It's so easy to bemoan the control we lose (a major problem given our existing workflows) and have no use for the functionality it confers (simplicity, batteries included, lack of yaks that need shaving). A really great new idea…

We do intend the HN audience to love this too. Our target audience is developers building backends. We don't expect we'll wrestle people from their Emacs, so we're definitely not targeting all possible developers today, but definitely developers.

> We don't expect we'll wrestle people from their Emacs

Well with what I saw on the videos if it's possible to extend Dark inside itself - yeah, I would prefer this over Emacs

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#185

Post by mapcars »

inimino wrote: post #77
pbiggar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do intend the HN audience to love this too. Our target audience is developers building backends. We don't expect we'll wrestle people from their Emacs, so we're definitely not targeting all possible developers today, but definitely developers.

You're never going to wrestle anyone who experienced more than one tech hype cycle into such a stark vendor lock-in situation.

Most languages are vendor lock-in actually, with forks not passing an experimentation level. OpenJDK may be the only working example from the mainstream languages.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#186

Post by eternalny1 »

btown wrote: post #148
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server (joke)

Hijacking the joke comment to plug Dark a little bit. Data migrations and schema changes are hard (especially when you want to test on a subset of users), and Parse only avoided a lot of this pain because it was typically used for relatively simple-schema'd projects. Dark seems to have done the hard work of making an entire language and environment to avoid footguns and provide more-or-less seamless data migrations,…

> I haven't been able to try it yet but desperately want to!

Yes, always good to plug something you haven't used.

Are you an investor by any chance?

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#187

Post by jimbokun »

nnq wrote: post #95
falcolas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, no Rust or Go for you? EDIT: I got it, I got it. Go has multiple implementations. Bad example.

Go - OK, it has one implementation (open-source), but it's backed by one big player (Google) and used by many others... also the simplicity at core design decisions sound like the kind of choices that would make an alternative compiler easier to implement than for other languages Rust - pretty fast growing open-source community despite only one implementation... but yeah I'm sort of worried that Rust is a "hard to im…

"... but yeah I'm sort of worried that Rust is a "hard to implement" kind of language with maybe a not high enough bus factor... similar worries for Julia too"

Which is fair, but they seem like the kind of language where the compiler or run time is the really important part of the language, so it might make sense to have multiple implementations. Rust without the lifetimes implementation, and Julia without the highly dynamic but high performance run time, aren't worth much.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#188

Post by eternalny1 »

pbiggar wrote: post #141
carlosdp wrote: post #125

I think the fact it maintains the "backend/frontend" separation makes it an awkward product solution imo. Dark being a proprietary language means most "experienced" or "full-time" software engineers probably won't touch it. You can get pretty close to "deployless" with FaaS services now anyways in whatever language you like. So if this is being targeted toward low-experience/no-experience developers that just want to…

> I think the fact it maintains the "backend/frontend" separation makes it an awkward product solution imo. When we were thinking about the scope for Dark, we briefly thought about trying to remove all the complexity for frontend too. However, when thinking about how Meteor went, and specifically about how much stuff is going on in the frontend world, we thought it would be simpler to understand if we stopped at the…

> we briefly thought about trying to remove all the complexity for frontend too

Well, I think this whole idea is wrong, but at least you quit while you were ahead with that one.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#189

Post by jimbokun »

ithkuil wrote: post #132
carlosdp wrote: post #125

I think the fact it maintains the "backend/frontend" separation makes it an awkward product solution imo. Dark being a proprietary language means most "experienced" or "full-time" software engineers probably won't touch it. You can get pretty close to "deployless" with FaaS services now anyways in whatever language you like. So if this is being targeted toward low-experience/no-experience developers that just want to…

It seems that darklang goes one step further than your average faas: every new code you write is deployed as you write it without any explicit deploy action, but the design of the Lang/IDE ensures new code is always behind a feature flag that makes that new behavior visible only to you until you decide to expand the audience until eventually reaching 100% of the users. You can do that with any language and any server…

"... but the design of the Lang/IDE ensures new code is always behind a feature flag that makes that new behavior visible only to you until you decide to expand the audience until eventually reaching 100% of the users."

Ah, so "Dark" as in "dark launch"?

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#190

Post by [deleted] »

bgnm2000 wrote: post #36

A little over a year ago I was building an app, and decided I'd have literally no backend at all. I wanted to build something fast and ship it to the appstores as quickly as possible to go through the process. After I launched, it was featured by apple and was getting thousands of downloads per day. Users wanted to be able to save their data across devices - but it wasn't something I really had time to build in the w…

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