241–250 of 261 posts
They are 'allowing' people into a private beta of a programming language? Coupled with the fact it is not open source and has a bunch of fad ad-tech videos on the front page this is so many red flags.
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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.
A language with only a single, open-source implementation controlled by a single vendor, like Go or Erlang, has slightly more risk, in that the single vendor could choose to take the language in a direction you don't like. However, even if that were to happen, it's open source, and the community can maintain it as long as there are enough users.
A language primarily controlled by a single entity that is actively hostile towards openness, like Java, is a little more risky yet, but even so, with enough users it becomes safe enough.
A language that's not open at all, like Mathematica or F#, puts you entirely at the mercy of the company that controls it... but if that company is big and has a good track record, it's still at least a reasonable trade-off.
Now, if something is created by a startup that has at best even odds of being around in five years... you still might take that risk if the technology was open, and you could run it yourself when they close up shop, like, say, Meteor or MongoDB. These are decisions that one is rather more likely to regret, but it's not hard to see how people make them.
However, if a new company introduces a new language that is also it's own walled-garden deployment environment, which you can't run on your own systems, which has no demonstrated history of doing anything well, and which is not open source, anyone choosing that language for a project that's expected to be around for a while would have to be either inexperienced or just plain crazy.
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Excel, the most popular functional programming language in the world, is closed-source.
PowerPoint, the worlds least favorite programming language is too!
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Paul, the incentives you've put into place with this business will destroy your company. The proposition you've set up for developers is to build their buildings on land you still own. Established developers already understand the risks associated with this practice and will avoid you. At some point if anyone manages to build a business with darklang you will have them over a barrel and they will accept any cost incr…
How is this different than running on certain cloud providers? For instance, a team can become deeply integrated with AWS services and then have trouble moving off if AWS starts raising prices.
I really want to try this, but when I put my email address in the website, it's making me fill out what I want to build with it and when I plan to ship and what's my favorite cloud platform... Holy crap, y'all, I just want to try out your language. It looks cool and all, but why can't I just download the IDE and try it? How are you going to get traction if normal people can't just play around with your language at ho…
I'd be easy on them. They're still in their early days and want to exercise control over who receives the product. They probably have a good idea about who it's a fit for and who it isn't. Additionally, they probably want to be high touch right now since it is a whole new language + IDE + paradigm.
I guess I'm just disappointed because my interest was piqued a couple months ago (probably when they hit alpha??), and I expected the next big announcement to be able to download something and try it out, or at least play with an online REPL.
Also IME "Show HN" means I can try something out. In this case it just means "hey we've hit another milestone but you still gotta wait indefinitely if you want to use it".
I'm probably being too negative, but again it's because I'm excited by the concept. A definite hurdle for me on my side/hobby projects is setting up all the infrastructure for some little toy app, so this concept is really exciting to me.
Congrats to the team, seriously--based on the demo this is a pretty mature product and the UX looks really amazing. I hope the next big announcement is that I can try it out :)
ummm, no
I had a chance to sit down with Ellen, one of the co-founders, and see an earlier beta. Congratulations to the entire team on this milestone; excited to see what you have in store. For context, I used to run a consulting company where I shipped a lot of greenfield software, especially CRUD MVP apps (which I think is a segment you're targeting). So I love folks trying to make this kind of work easier. I'm curious who…
Great stuff! My suggestion is to really leverage the possibilities opened up by the design choices that make Dark different - the structural editing and db/infra/editor integration. E.g.: - Have multiple projectional views of the system, triggered on keypress, e.g. caller context, database context, handler context. So if I'm editing a function I should be able to see the handlers that are affected, also the call stac…
- DB/field annotations for privacy - given it's 'one integrated system', can we attach a privacy attributes to fields or db and automatically hide them everywhere (even in the dev view?)
IMHO this as the first time we have improvement in the huge complexity required nowadays to have a backend, particularly for a small company which can not afford a whole Devops or Infrastructure team.
Just a one question: - Given your use of OCaml and Reason ML why did you choose to go with your own language instead of using one of them. Wouldn't it be easier for developers to adopt say Reason ML, and then just use a library you provide?