Show HN: Darklang • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#41

Post by vemv » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #33

vemv wrote: post #26

From the landing page: > Speed of developer iteration is the single most important factor in how quickly a technology company can move. What? "Speed of developer iteration" barely makes any sense, it's poor wording. In any case that proposition seems dubious. Companies exist to please customers, not its own developers. Too often we (developers) conflate our happiness/productivity with that of the actual stakeholders.…

We've also built tools for guarantees around correctness. My video discusses our deployless tooling, and it's also discussed in the blog post: https://medium.com/darklang/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms-77... We think a lot about how large teams build at scale, and while we don't support everything we'd need for large teams just yet, Dark is designed for this use case.

I've read the blog posts in the past, and it seems quite likely that Dark could be a large conflation of concepts (as opposed to composition), which repeatedly traded off desirable properties for faster deployments.

The opposite is not impossible though, I'm certainly open to see the actual offering and tradeoffs. I'm mostly expressing that Dark's marketing likely won't appeal to people who tend to question things a lot; extensive rationale is needed for us.

Btw, it seems quite possible to hack a vanilla Clojure setup (Reloaded workflow, tools.deps, some CI magic) to offer deployments under 30s. I just don't see it as worth the effort, and also I actively pursue some healthy constraints (slightly slower deployments = more thought put into things).

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#42

Post by pbiggar » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #38

pbiggar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will absolutely support light mode, and we plan to deal with many other accessibility concerns (I touch on that very briefly at the end of my video). This sort of inclusivity is massively important to us. I hadn't realized Dark mode was tough for certain audiences - I'll add it to the list. (We also plan to get an a11y consultant in to make sure we get all of them)

Wonderful, thank you! While I've got you, let me put in a word for proportional font support if you don't already have it. Proportional fonts are another thing that make it easier for me to read code. Would be happy to chat with you about any of this stuff - contact info is in my HN profile.

Thank you for the kind offer! I will definitely reach out.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#43

Post by neuromancer2701 » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

So what kind of prototype do you have to have to get money to work on this for 2 years?

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#44

Post by nickthemagicman » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

This is really cool and very intriguing.

Can we access the data store/our data outside of dark?

What is the datastore build on top of? Is that proprietary?

Also, is there the option to use the raw Twilio API if we want or is the dark version the main one supported?

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#45

Post by pbiggar » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

neuromancer2701 wrote: post #43

So what kind of prototype do you have to have to get money to work on this for 2 years?

Honestly, our "prototype" was screenshots from an 800 line demo, and about half the people we spoke to believed that this wasn't actually possible to build.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#46

Post by neutogouln » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

This definitely deserves to be on the front page more than any discussion involving Snowden.

/s

#HNPropaganda

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#47

Post by steve_adams_86 » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

Having worked full stack for so long, sometimes things like this seem way over the top and I don't really get it. Why not have control over your language? Why not have control over deployment, VCS, servers, etc?

I think I understand now that this isn't for me, but could have been once. At one point in your career, you know little or none of this stuff. Something like this would have been very empowering for me while I figured it all out I bet. I like to see technologies empowering people to do more, so I'm looking forward to seeing what people build with this. It looks pretty cool so far.

I would be afraid of hitting limitations and being locked in. That would be a major drag.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#48

Post by vemv » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #34

vemv wrote: post #26

From the landing page: > Speed of developer iteration is the single most important factor in how quickly a technology company can move. What? "Speed of developer iteration" barely makes any sense, it's poor wording. In any case that proposition seems dubious. Companies exist to please customers, not its own developers. Too often we (developers) conflate our happiness/productivity with that of the actual stakeholders.…

"speed of developer iteration" is a phrase I've heard outside of Dark. Specifically, "developer iteration" is how fast you're able to iterate on ideas with your code. If you can ship stuff faster, you can iterate on your ideas faster.

It's development and not developers the thing being iterated, right?

It's as if I wrote "developer deployment".

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#49

Post by pbiggar » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

andrewnc wrote: post #23

I got the email, and read through the post, it seems awesome. I remember the original HN post and am excited to see the progress. I have a few random questions. 1. What is the support for interop with other languages (e.g., python for machine learning, rust for low level). Or is that even a reasonable question to ask? 2. What is the pricing structure going to look like? Very exciting! This is great.

1. The "foreign function interface" in Dark is HTTP. So to do machine learning, either use a service that for it, or put your ML stuff in a container with a HTTP wrapper around it.

2. We plan to charge for infrastructure, on a usage basis. If you use only a little, that should fit within the free tier.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#50

Post by halfway » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

The way workers and events are exposed looks pretty slick, and I think abstracting away infrastructure and dev environments is the future for teams who care about speed to market. One nagging question is, how do you plan to make money? Will you have a free/freemium self-service offering? Any plans to target enterprise? I think some assurance of financial viability would ease the minds of otherwise reluctant adopters. Full disclosure, I'm a solo developer working in the IaaS space.