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Deno raises $21M

deno.com

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Re: Deno raises $21M

#241
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, my point is that any number of cloud providers could swoop in and offer the same product for probably cheaper

This is generally true about every company though. Someone can always swoop in, and huge incumbents can always do it cheaper, at least in theory.

Warren Buffett only invests in companies with what he calls a "moat" that make it hard for any other company to offer a similar product or service.

Apple's moat, for example, is its institutional knowledge of design and maybe its relationships with its suppliers, e.g., their deal with TSMC to lock up most of TSMC's capacity on the 5-nm node. Another moat Apple has is consumers who do not like engaging in sysadmin battles with their consumer electronics. One of my friends, a 79-year-old woman, for example, told me once that she wouldn't consider buying a computer from any company except Apple. (I could probably induce her to change her mind on that, but it would take persistence and patient explanation on my part, and also I'm probably the only person who could change it.) The main way Apple has maintained (for 38 years!) its dominance in institutional knowledge of design is probably the fact that most of the young talented designers want to work for Apple (partly because most of the people willing to pay extra from good design in consumer electronics buy from Apple).

Google Search's moat seems to be institutional knowledge on how to build a good search engine and access to data on what people search for and which search results they click. Strengthening the latter moat is the reason they're so interesting in having all traffic from the consumer's browser encrypted: namely, so that the consumer's ISP cannot sell data on the consumer's interactions with Google's search engine to any competing search engines. Another moat Google has is that most consumers will not take the trouble to change the default choice of the search engine used when the consumer types a non-URL into the location bar of the browser. Strengthening that moat explains Google's willingness to pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine and Google's interest in giving away Chrome and Android.

Microsoft's moat: practically every organization uses computers and needs employees who know how to use those computers. They mostly choose Windows and Office because that is what most prospective employees know. In turn, when a young person improves his or her attractiveness to prospective employers by learning computer skills, they usually choose to learn Windows and Office because that is what is running on the computers of prospective employers.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#242

Serious question, how do investors plan on making a return on their investment? Where is the cash in this?

There is extreme vendor lockin with services like Deno. I'm sure that it'll be much more expensive in the future.

It is the lock in and potential feature gates that worry me. Also, it scares me developers will skill up in something that can disappear like the wind because the company didn’t hit their goals.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amusing to see a whole generation of senior developers (“senior” as in 5+ years of experience) that haven’t experienced web development without React[0] and who proceed to reinvent PHP/ASP.NET/RoR. [0] Used here as shorthand for “modern js driven development”

Been writing web stuff since before the dot-com bust. Preact + TypeScript is probably my favorite front-end programming combo yet. I liked VB6 and C# WinForms, though, so maybe I’m an invalid sample.

C# WinForms was super comfy for when you just wanted to throw together some simple GUI tool for internal use. As powerful as WPF and similar frameworks are they definitely lose to WinForms in ease of use.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#244
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse this time, in that the old shared hosting environments (e.g. Apache with FastCGI and suexec, or nginx with fpm) were open source, and there were countless shared hosts. The new generation of multi-tenant isolate-based JS runtimes are proprietary, and AFAIK one can count the number of hosts on one hand.

You can self-host Cloudflare Workers. https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare

This is very much specifically a developer and testing tool, not a robust runtime that is at all akin to self hosting Cloudflare Workers

Re: Deno raises $21M

#245
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can self-host Cloudflare Workers. https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare

This is very much specifically a developer and testing tool, not a robust runtime that is at all akin to self hosting Cloudflare Workers

FWIW, we'll be open sourcing the real thing in a couple months (I'm actively working on the necessary refactoring as we speak...). https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081

Re: Deno raises $21M

#246
post #69

This question is going to make me sound like a jerk, but why do you want to write your back-end in JS? Deno looks like a great improvement over node.js, but I don't feel compelled to use it. It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like…

- Javascript's async-everything is rather unique.

- Synchronous execution + async-everything is a great combo.

- First class Promise abstraction.

- Good general purpose language. Its warts are mostly smoothed over. It's not like Javascript from 20 years ago.

I like writing Javascript. I certainly prefer it over the other popular dynamically typed languages. (I don't see what Ruby or Python offer me over JS as general languages)

Rust and Go make different trade-offs. I would never default to either for general purpose projects. Meanwhile JS is my default for networked code.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#247
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I changed my view on this―I hated how things were going full circle. But in reality, human civilization loves overdoing a particular direction and then reverts to the mean. You see this with the economy, moral fashions, everything. I am an optimist in that I (have started to) believe that this slowly allows us to converge on better solutions for everything. PHP was easy to set up, easy to host, easy to understand and…

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

[deleted]

Re: Deno raises $21M

#248
> JavaScript is unlike other programming languages in that it is the universal scripting language. Its universality combined with security from the browser and its raw performance lends itself to a solution for these problems, at least for a certain common class of applications.

You want to sell Javascript based solutions, go for it. But don’t push this nonsense like “No language like Javascript”. The only reason Javascript has a wider adoption than others is because it’s forced upon us. Browsers understand just Javascript to display web pages, period. Doesn’t make it the best because of that reason. I say this as an experienced IT consultant managing a wide array of projects over my career across industries.

You know what usually bites me when I touch code that has not been touched for 6 months (usually a late contract renewal)? It’s not my Elixir or Ruby code that’s running on autopilot. It’s the stupid Javascript with its Node based dependencies all failing randomly in each direction just because some developer used a library for something trivial they could have written themselves or super likely because Babel or Webpack decided to change their config files so my entire JS pipeline breaks. JS is a language full of patchwork and its entire ecosystem, more so - it certainly has gotten better over the years. If it works for you, then great. But it’s a far cry from a “one solution for everything that’s better than everything else”.

Personally, I use Coffeescript. It has been a breeze from all aspects.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#249
post #248

> JavaScript is unlike other programming languages in that it is the universal scripting language. Its universality combined with security from the browser and its raw performance lends itself to a solution for these problems, at least for a certain common class of applications. You want to sell Javascript based solutions, go for it. But don’t push this nonsense like “No language like Javascript”. The only reason Jav…

> You want to sell Javascript based solutions, go for it. But don’t push this nonsense like “No language like Javascript”. The only reason Javascript has a wider adoption than others is that it’s forced upon us.

It is forced upon us doesn't mean it can't be universal. On the contrary, it usually is. It's like how USD is kinda forced around the world but it's universal nonetheless.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#250
post #188

Deno overstates the problem it is intended to solve because its founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer-famous. Let's say a company were to adopt this tech over Node, well, it seems like it would be slightly better, but probably not much of a game-changer. I'll leave it to y'all to talk about what tech is truly interesting as I don't want to seem ideological/biased, I just don't see how Deno i…

It's usually not enough to be a bit better than what you're trying to displace, you have to be 10X better than the status quo to have any real impact. For example, SVN tried to be a better CVS, while Git came out of left field and destroyed the competition by being 10X better. In that, Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js. Meteor.js also though that funding could be the answer, but it wasn't. They're both clev…

>Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js

In substance they are similar in that they both want/ed tighter "vertical integration" of tools ("DX") in an opinionated way, with the money-making plan being convenient paid hosting. "Look how easy and fun it is to make powerful stuff; we hope you give us money to host it for you!" So far the only company that's had success with this pitch is Amazon of all people, by offering a staggering array of partially specialized EC2 instances behind an API.

For whatever reason, it does seem like devs really like their app authoring tools to be independent of their distribution mechanisms. Maybe AWS doesn't trigger this because it doesn't feel like hosting (even though it is). When a whole diverse community seems to act coherently in this way, it's probably a good idea to listen to them. (Alternatively, when a community acts coherently, its ALSO a good idea to try something new.)

Deno is quite good. It may even be 10x node, if only because it avoids npm and has a much more thoughtful module system. It's a (much) better DX, too. Can they make money? Time will tell and, luckily, that's not my problem!

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