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We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

darklang.com

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Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#91

Post by adamsea »

twodave wrote: post #43

It’s a bold move. I like it, but I’m alarmed at how many people are acting like $3k isn’t worth taking. If I wasn’t solidly anchored on the east coast (Jacksonville, FL) I’d be taking a serious look at this, since it would give me about a 30% better chance at bootstrapping and avoiding taking on funding or other debt to build something cool.

If someone is serious about starting a company, betting the success or failure of that company on an entirely new piece of technology (unless it’s critical for the product) in exchange for $3K/month doesn’t sound compelling.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#92

Post by pbiggar »

pritambarhate wrote: post #86
pbiggar wrote: post #60

Lots of folks asking exactly what Dark is so answering separately. tl;dr Dark is a programming language and service. Our goal is to allow you to build backends without having to deal with the endless accidental complexity in software today. (Accidental complexity meaning everything from infrastructure and storage, to syntax errors, etc). What does that mean exactly? Dark is a language, and editor and a PaaS, combined…

Will it be possible to deploy Dark apps outside your platform? I don't mind paying for the language and SDK. We already do that for Visual Studio and C#. But being locked in your PaaS forever is a nonstarter.

While it's hard to say how the business will go, that's not really the goal. We're trying to make coding much much easier, and the tight integration is part of that.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#93

Post by twodave »

ggggtez wrote: post #82
twodave wrote: post #43

It’s a bold move. I like it, but I’m alarmed at how many people are acting like $3k isn’t worth taking. If I wasn’t solidly anchored on the east coast (Jacksonville, FL) I’d be taking a serious look at this, since it would give me about a 30% better chance at bootstrapping and avoiding taking on funding or other debt to build something cool.

But the whole point is it isn't in Jacksonville. It's in San Francisco, where $3k will pay your rent and that's about it. So you'd really want to reconsider not taking other funding or debt.

Actually I thought the point was that it’s $3k/mo easier than it normally would be.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#94

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

matte_black wrote: post #51

Does anyone not even realize that if Dark really is so easy to use that you can build a scalable app in an afternoon, it will not even take a month for a startup to build their backend, and thus they will pay nothing?

Not if step 1 is to port C++.

I hope this idea works out for them though. It's about time someone paid the users of the software.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#95

Post by clone1018 »

wffurr wrote: post #79

Tangential to the post, but the pages on darklang.com are really fast. They load instantly . I clicked the Medium link and it took a couple seconds to load what was essentially a blank page. The darklang.com homepage took 70 msec for DOMContentLoaded and was only 25.5 KB total page weight. That's even including two fonts! Hacker News is usually my gold standard for a lightweight fast page. And while HN is only 13 KB…

It's all just hosted on GitHub, uses regular HTML and CSS, no javascript :)

http://darklang.github.io

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#96

Post by lilyball »

FireBeyond wrote: post #44
lilyball wrote: post #27

I get the feeling a lot of people in the comments here didn't actually read the article. If you're complaining that $3k isn't enough to live in SF, you missed the point. Dark isn't trying to pay you a $3k salary. They're not looking to hire someone to build a random app. They're looking for an employee of some other startup to camp out in their office for 3 months and use Dark to build the backend for that startup, a…

I feel that you are extrapolating on one data point. The quote I think you're using to say "this is for startups": > We pay you (or your company) $3000 a month. In contrast to the multitude of other more personal references: > We'll pay you $3000/mo > Dark is a new tool to help you build a complete scalable app in an afternoon. How many startups are working on "building an app in an afternoon"? > You come to the offi…

I mean, you certainly could be a sole operator working for yourself and be interested in this, but the point remains that the $3k isn't meant to replace whatever compensation you would have received if you didn't take this offer.

I guess the important point here is you're not supposed to quit your day job with the expectation that Dark will pay you a livable wage to build your pet project.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#97

Post by pbiggar »

cpeterso wrote: post #66
pbiggar wrote: post #60

Lots of folks asking exactly what Dark is so answering separately. tl;dr Dark is a programming language and service. Our goal is to allow you to build backends without having to deal with the endless accidental complexity in software today. (Accidental complexity meaning everything from infrastructure and storage, to syntax errors, etc). What does that mean exactly? Dark is a language, and editor and a PaaS, combined…

Adopting a new language with no ecosystem of libraries seems like a hard way to build useful applications. Or does Dark build upon an existing ecosystem like Elixir and Erlang? Dark's feature set reminds me a lot of Erlang.

We're mindful of this. Our goal is making coding much easier, and obviously that will need libraries. Our plan is that in the early days we'll make it very clear what Dark is useful for, and what's outside of its capabilities.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#98

Post by throwawayjava »

pbiggar wrote: post #89
projectramo wrote: post #83

If I were to take advantage of this opportunity, my main question would be about darklang. While it is interesting to be paid to give some feedback to a system and maybe learn something, it would be interesting to know just what it was. Consider: if you told me darklang was a python based language that was built on top of django/AWS and automated a lot of the work around it. Consider: you told me darklang was a JSON…

Good question. Conceptually, Dark is most similar to your django/aws example. There's a lot more types, though in a really good way. We're aiming for all the advantages of static typing, coupled with all the advantages of dynamic typing. For example, you use the same types all the way from DB schemas to API validation.

> We're aiming for all the advantages of static typing, coupled with all the advantages of dynamic typing. For example, you use the same types all the way from DB schemas to API validation.

Sounds like what Microsoft tried to do with the .NET ecosystem, but with cloud integration (which Microsoft should be doing for their own cloud) and API validation.

Someone needs to actually succeed at doing this. Most of the type-checking/inference problems in this domain are decidable -- it's really a tooling/tooling integration problem. Creating a single unified tool instead of having developers clobber together libraries (JSON schema validator, ORM, MVC framework, deployment workflow for all of that, etc.) would be a huge value-add.

Suggestion: code example/screenshot/workflow video on your homepage, and a link to your homepage in the advert. Nearly every programming language/library out there has a concise "hello, world" example on their homepage. Nearly every software development tool has a screenshot of sorts on their homepage. Those examples are worth a million words. Even an appropriately caveated "Wizard of Oz" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment) demo would go a long way.

Re: We'll pay you $3000/mo to build your startup on Dark

#100

Post by cpeterso »

pbiggar wrote: post #97
cpeterso wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adopting a new language with no ecosystem of libraries seems like a hard way to build useful applications. Or does Dark build upon an existing ecosystem like Elixir and Erlang? Dark's feature set reminds me a lot of Erlang.

We're mindful of this. Our goal is making coding much easier, and obviously that will need libraries. Our plan is that in the early days we'll make it very clear what Dark is useful for, and what's outside of its capabilities.

Cool. I read through your papers on SSA and FFIs for scripting languages, so I'm sure Dark will have an interesting approach on these issues. :)
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