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Show HN: Darklang

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Re: Show HN: Darklang

#231
First, thanks to Paul Biggar and the Dark team, for fighting complexity.

Whether or not we agree with Dark's approach doesn't invalidate it in any way. It may mean we don't understand it. There are plenty of companies selling non-FOSS tools and making others successful with them. FOSS does not mean a secure future by any means. The fact that they know they have to prioritize making it a sustainable business is a good sign.

Using any tool, and depending on it commercially, is a risk. You weigh that against who is behind it, the path forward if it goes away, etc. It's easier if you can keep building even when the company goes away. If you rely on their servers, there is always more risk. Is there more risk to a project like Dark than FB's Parse? Nobody can say, without inside information.

What you have to look at, when selecting any tool (ignore the fact that there's a language component here, or that we're devs), is the benefit and the risk. If you have a stack that works for you, and you don't think there's a problem with how you're doing things, don't change. It's really that simple. But there is a revival of RAD, called Low Code, that says there are a lot of businesses out there with needs that aren't being properly met with our "modern" dev processes. If you can get a working product out, and it runs for a couple years, that's a win if you couldn't do it any other way. If you only use Dark to prove a concept, rewrite it after that if you're scared it will go away. Once you have a working product, though, good luck convincing the business it should be rewritten without strong justification.

But we can step back even further and ask: Do you think the state of software development is great? Just OK? Don't see any issues? Do you think that complexity is killing us and things we call solutions really aren't? Or are you somewhere in between?

In watching the videos, there are some things that aren't to my taste. But they note that this is not the final product. If you watch Paul's video, can you deny there is some deep thinking behind it, smart people who have already done a lot while being forced to make real-world compromises.

Yes, it's a business, but they're doing it to make our lives easier too. Shouldn't we cheer them on and wish them the best of luck?

That's what I'm doing.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#232

Does (or will) Dark have a light mode? Given the name and seeing the dark mode screenshots in the article, I wonder. This is an honest worry for an older developer like me. When you're young, your eyes can focus on just about anything. This changes as you get older. A dark mode causes your pupils to open wider, where a light mode gets them to stop down. And if your lenses are imperfect, stopping down helps make thing…

Lack of light mode is also a problem when you have sub-optimal lighting in the workplace. Bright UIs can block out glare and reflections, thus preventing tiredness and headaches in such cases.

I'd say that it is a problem when you have optimal lighting in the workplace.

It's sad that we have to stare into a bright light all day just to accommodate natural sunlight, or shut the blinds and code in the dark. Can't wait for cheap, fast and unlit high contrast monitor technology resembling the experience of plain paper.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#233
There are a lot of interesting ideas here. They're two years in, I'd guess perhaps one or two years from the larger vision of supporting real applications with lots of users.

I'm interested to see where this goes, and if they're not able to turn the closed-source version of this into a business, perhaps they'll inspire some community of OSS people to do something like it.

I'll say after having worked on migrations out of proprietary platforms like App Engine, I wouldn't use anything I couldn't run myself all the way down to the bare metal should their company up and disappear. They will have a lot of problems convincing people to bet their business on this platform if it's completely closed.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#234
post #83

Is there an open source version of the language? ...bc I'm not touching a programming language with a ten foot pole if it hasn't got at least two implementations, and at least one open source :| Sure, keep the IDEs and deployless infrastructure and all proprietary, but a core programming language in 2019 can only be open-source. Heck, even Microsoft gets it now.

Excel, the most popular functional programming language in the world, is closed-source.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#235

Does (or will) Dark have a light mode? Given the name and seeing the dark mode screenshots in the article, I wonder. This is an honest worry for an older developer like me. When you're young, your eyes can focus on just about anything. This changes as you get older. A dark mode causes your pupils to open wider, where a light mode gets them to stop down. And if your lenses are imperfect, stopping down helps make thing…

I am the complete opposite ... I'm in my 40s and dark modes are the only thing I can use. The bright white glare bothers my eyes and I can't work for hours staring into it. I have to go dark on everything these days. Back to the light-on-dark computers I grew up with :)

In my 40s as well and same here. Light mode hurts me. But always has. My first computer was monochrome green on black. Then MSX for many years where the first command after startup would be color15,1,1 (white on black) until I was able to make a custom eprom to have it at startup.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I can see that logic. But how many people are writing APIs and either 1) aren't experienced enough to figure out how to write a Lambda function (using a wrapper FaaS like Netlify), or 2) are experienced and are willing to sacrifice the ecosystem you get from open-source/widely adopted languages/frameworks for a marginal amount of convenience over something like Netlify, where they can use whatever language they…

> willing to sacrifice the ecosystem you get from open-source/widely adopted languages/frameworks for a marginal amount of convenience over something like Netlify Obviously, no one is going to leave something that's good for something that's slightly better with a ton of downsides. So either: 1) Dark is a lot better, like way way way better than what's come before, or 2) it's not, and no-one will use Dark. We can pro…

If 1) is true people might still not use it unless open source. Unthinkable in the 90s, now all companies (big and small) I work with demand open source languages and frameworks, besides for embedded work.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#237
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the joke here (asking for a friend)

Parse was a startup also offering an easier way to build a backend as SaaS. But then Facebook bought them and shut down the product, and all that remains is the open-source clone of the server that they were kind enough to make.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#238
post #234
post #83

Is there an open source version of the language? ...bc I'm not touching a programming language with a ten foot pole if it hasn't got at least two implementations, and at least one open source :| Sure, keep the IDEs and deployless infrastructure and all proprietary, but a core programming language in 2019 can only be open-source. Heck, even Microsoft gets it now.

Excel, the most popular functional programming language in the world, is closed-source.

PowerPoint, the worlds least favorite programming language is too!

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#239

Does (or will) Dark have a light mode? Given the name and seeing the dark mode screenshots in the article, I wonder. This is an honest worry for an older developer like me. When you're young, your eyes can focus on just about anything. This changes as you get older. A dark mode causes your pupils to open wider, where a light mode gets them to stop down. And if your lenses are imperfect, stopping down helps make thing…

I am the complete opposite ... I'm in my 40s and dark modes are the only thing I can use. The bright white glare bothers my eyes and I can't work for hours staring into it. I have to go dark on everything these days. Back to the light-on-dark computers I grew up with :)

I mainly use light modes, but very rarely use white ones. Similarly, I often find that many dark modes, esp. those emulating old-style terminals and computers, liek to put bright green colors on bright (as it were) black, or similar schemes that to me are more garish than, say, Base16.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people who are "self-taught coders" don't perceive themselves as "engineers", often because many other forms of engineering have certifications. They expect that "engineer" requires a certain level of knowledge that they do not have; it's an unknown unknown kind of thing. I know someone who, through using a lot of Goole Sheets, managed to re-invent SQL joins. She'd never identify as an engineer, but she did mana…

I personally find “engineer”'s use in a software context as pretty pretentious, so I understand how they might feel like they're really something different. What they don't know is they're as much a programmer as any other.

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