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Show HN: Darklang

medium.com

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Re: Show HN: Darklang

#251

Post by peternicky »

Ok so I’ve read the linked post (who still uses medium?? ;)) and the HN comments and I can’t think of a reason to consider this product.

Thinking about usage from two perspectives:

As a developer, junior/senior/whatever, I don’t know why I would use this. There are so many tools that accelerate and mitigate the difficulties associated with building services that I would choose in a heartbeat over something like this proprietary, closed source product.

As a manager/leader, I would never support using a tool like this. Again, closed source, lock-in, learning curve are a few concerns.

I hope my tone was not dismissive; I would really like to hear people from the dark team sell me on this.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#252

Post by pbiggar »

shalabhc wrote: post #222

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…

Great suggestions, you'll be happy to know many of these are on the roadmap, and some have already been done!

> Have multiple projectional views of the system,

Some amount of this works already (you can see callers and callees, you can see the DB schema); we want a callgraph view for sure, and I like the idea of seeing the handler at the bottom of the call stack.

> Easy example based testing

Yes, this is planned to work similar to traces, and it should be trivial to turn a trace into a test

> History of each function,

Yup, planned

> 'diff' of a snapshot against another one is great.

Planned, but low on the priority list compared to the other stuff you've mentioned.

> Annotations

Planned. We've implemented some grouping (similar concept but obviously different use cases to tagging). Some of these annotations would be automatic or semi-automatic.

> A standard CRUD UI for DBs

Planned :)

> DB/field annotations for privacy

We plan two aspects to this. There is the "PII indicator" which says this is PII and shouldn't be logged at all. Then there's access-control lists where we decide who (if anyone) can view certain attributes (eg: this dev is a contractor, do not show them live values).

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#253

Post by pbiggar »

josephhurtado wrote: post #250

Paul, first of all kudos on what your team has accomplished so far. And plenty of respect on having the courage to attempt a leap on how backend technology works. 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 Reaso…

There aren't any languages that support what we need to do to solve the complexity we want to solve, including OCaml/ReasonML.

Given that, whatever language we'd pick we'd have to hack them to get what we needed, and then we wouldn't have JS (realistically, if we were to pick some existing language it would have to be JS), we'd have some shitty version of JS.

Which is what App Engine did with their early versions: I worked on an app engine project that had a hacked version of Django where nothing worked.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#255

Post by josephhurtado »

pbiggar wrote: post #253
josephhurtado wrote: post #250

Paul, first of all kudos on what your team has accomplished so far. And plenty of respect on having the courage to attempt a leap on how backend technology works. 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 Reaso…

There aren't any languages that support what we need to do to solve the complexity we want to solve, including OCaml/ReasonML. Given that, whatever language we'd pick we'd have to hack them to get what we needed, and then we wouldn't have JS (realistically, if we were to pick some existing language it would have to be JS), we'd have some shitty version of JS. Which is what App Engine did with their early versions: I…

I wish it was possible... as of now Darklang is mostly a language that only runs inside of Dark; that will be a problem in the future, but I understand that it's early days, and this was the sound decision to do now. Godspeed!

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#256

Post by karmakaze »

karmakaze wrote: post #196
hobofan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with maybe a not high enough bus factor I'm assuming you don't mean the traditional bus factor, but one of alternative implementations? Rust (and from what I can tell after short research Julia at least partially too) has quite a big development team that is supported by many different companies with no benevolent dictator, so I don't see a big bus factor risk.

I generally read bus factor as having few who fully understand a codebase written in said language so if they were to be hit by a bus you'd lose ability not easy to hire.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#257

Post by maremp »

I fail to see how this is "a holistic programming language". From what I see, I would call it a SaaS for building APIs. Even if I were able to use outside the platform (which doesn't appear to be possible) it looks more of a framework or DSL at best.

The linked post, the videos, and the landing page are good in terms of marketing for non-programmers. But it is not satisfying to me as a developer, especially when trying to convince me to buy in the whole platform + custom editor stuff.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#258

Post by erandros »

jamesb93 wrote: post #103

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.

I agree, but how did it get so many upvotes? there's a huge disconnect between most top level commenters not liking it and the aprox. 350 karma.

I'm a new user so this is very confusing to me.

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#259

Post by iq22hi »

ithkuil wrote: post #204
carlosdp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That progressive deployment is neat and all, but I'm not convinced that's a problem that actually existed. More importantly, I'm definitely not convinced it's a big enough feature to drive a significant amount of developers to sacrifice the ecosystem benefit from using a popular/open-source language to use a proprietary language that only works on one proprietary cloud host. Like how is that a 10x improvement on modi…

I do share that feeling of unease that comes from non only from the lock-in but also from the departure from the text-only environment I'm so used and probably many other things that might be practical showstoppers for dark adoption. Right now I'm looking at it for what it is: food for thought. For me this gradual deploy matters because: 1. it generalizes local development and production and possibly also staging/tes…

Does dark provide graphql api?

Re: Show HN: Darklang

#260

Post by karmakaze »

erandros wrote: post #258
jamesb93 wrote: post #103

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.

I agree, but how did it get so many upvotes? there's a huge disconnect between most top level commenters not liking it and the aprox. 350 karma. I'm a new user so this is very confusing to me.

HN has a much broader population than individual comment threads might indicate.
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