Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Darklang

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 261 posts

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#71

Post by chasefoto »

tiborsaas wrote: post #35

I applaud the effort for the project because it's really ambitious. The delivery at this point on the other hand makes me a bit skeptical. I've watched the hello world app a few times and my impression is that it relies on lots of convention over configuration (same reason I disliked Rails). The "cards" or files on the canvas look a bit chaotic and their relations are not clear at all what thing triggers which event.…

I've been using the private beta for several months now. It took a few hours to get the hang of it, and once the language clicks, the speed of development moves quick.

I'm sure the Dark team will be releasing more in depth videos soon with a look into the language soon!

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#73

Post by OmarIsmail »

This is really awesome and even if it doesn't "win" is a glimpse of a future where you can build a full scale tech company and nobody needs to know about things like k8s and "service meshes".

This is obviously very early but for doing basic backend stuff there's so many smart things here going on already that it's already 10x better for the use cases they're targeting.

The one thing that didn't get covered in the "Dark in action" video that should have is where do the twilio/slack tokens get stored? I'm sure there's some environment/global variable somewhere UI somewhere but the fact that it's alluded to but never shown is an annoying omission.

If they work on a ton of integrations (which is super annoying work unfortunately) I could see this being a big competitor to Zapier or the whole "glue" type infra work that so many companies deal with. If they take a marketplace approach where people can build "blocks" that are easily shared that would be a big deal. And considering they run the whole stack, monetizing the sharing of blocks would be a cool business model too.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#74

Post by pbiggar »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #73

This is really awesome and even if it doesn't "win" is a glimpse of a future where you can build a full scale tech company and nobody needs to know about things like k8s and "service meshes". This is obviously very early but for doing basic backend stuff there's so many smart things here going on already that it's already 10x better for the use cases they're targeting. The one thing that didn't get covered in the "Da…

Thank you for the kind words!

> The one thing that didn't get covered in the "Dark in action" video that should have is where do the twilio/slack tokens get stored? I'm sure there's some environment/global variable somewhere UI somewhere but the fact that it's alluded to but never shown is an annoying omission.

We actually just put them in functions. We haven't built a secret UI, and we didn't build global vars because functions do the same thing.

> If they work on a ton of integrations (which is super annoying work unfortunately) I could see this being a big competitor to Zapier or the whole "glue" type infra work that so many companies deal with. If they take a marketplace approach where people can build "blocks" that are easily shared that would be a big deal.

We plan to add a package manager so that packages (which could be wrappers of various APIs) can be shared. So similar to npm, rubygems, cargo, pypi, etc.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#76

Post by pbiggar »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #75

Any chance of a link that doesn't require a medium account? Sounds interesting from the comments.

Hmmm, I wonder if it's a growth hack that Medium is doing. In incognito mode, i don't get the registration requirement. I'm told clicking "next" just gets you through it?

Sorry about this, I think medium wasn't the best choice for the blog.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#77

Post by inimino »

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.

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

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#78

Post by bontaq »

I guess if you wanted to do something similar but open, you can edit code directly on your server, use erlang/elixir's hot reloading, and call it 50ms deploys.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#79

Post by zulgan »

congratz!

maybe for the generation which grows up with scratch, new concepts and ideas are needed. not sure if darklang will make it, but exploration in the space will surely help.

writing this from while using emacs as a window manager(exwm), made me realize how impossible it is for me to evaluate change.

best of luck.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#80

Post by pbiggar »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #44

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?

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

Yes and no. You can easily put an API in front of it so that you can expose it however you like, download it, etc. But there isn't something like a postgres connection string.

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

The goal with the datastore was that there is no impedance mismatch between values in the runtime and values in the datastore. The actual implementation is a thin layer over postgres.

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

Yes. That Twilio::sendText call is just a wrapped HTTP call, and under the hood it's pretty similar to how we called the Slack API in the video.

Post reply on HN