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Deno raises $21M

deno.com

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Re: Deno raises $21M

#251

Post by vkou »

brtkdotse wrote: post #45
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #15

> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […] This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again?

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”

Re-inventing PHP but with less of the garbage that is PHP isn't a bad thing.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#253

Post by alephnan »

neya wrote: 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…

> Doesn’t make it the best because of that reason.

This is a strawman. Where in the original post did they say JavaScript was the best. They said JavaScript is the "universal" scripting language in the sense that is ubiquitous. That is fact. You literally confirmed it here:

> Javascript has a wider adoption than others is because it’s forced upon us

> 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 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.

Okay....? Then write VanillaJS instead of depending on Node dependencies. It's not JavaScript's fault that you're a contractor dealing with other developers' app-level tech debt.

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

That's a cool story, but Deno uses TypeScript so the whole JavaScript rant crumbles here.

> Browsers understand just Javascript to display web pages, period.

Bits like this make me feel like you're just throwing a bunch of domain-related words together and hopes something sticks.

Browsers understand more than JavaScript, and JavaScript isn't the control layer for logic, which can including displaying page, but ultimately its HTML that is for displaying the web page.

> I say this as an experienced IT consultant managing a wide array of projects over my career across industries.

I say this as an experience software engineer deploying a wide array of web apps getting hundreds of millions of views a month over my career across FANG companies.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#254

Post by javajosh »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #246
vlunkr wrote: 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…

>Python, Ruby

I like js too, but both python and ruby are much better languages. It's just that js won distribution, which means it won adoption, which means you have 10MM devs smoothing it's rough edges. Just to take one language feature, consider pythons list and map comprehensions. js has nothing like that - but it also has 10 high quality libraries that do that and more, like lodash. Consider also the ridiculousness around javascript's "OOP" features, like the use of "this", or it's behavior around truthiness, or (arguably) the misfeature of prototypal inheretance - all of which can be forgiven because functions are, after all, first class in javascript, which means you can, with enough effort, fix all the things.

In truth if you want to understand absolutely everything about your runtime, and have some feeling of safety in a sandbox, then the jvm is the best. The vmspec is great, as is the langspec. It's very fast. The tools are mature. Lots of languages are written for it. It's behavior under load is well-understood. Like PHP there is a lot of bad code written for it, which gives it a bad name, but it's still a real gem.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#255

Post by seabrookmx »

scarface74 wrote: post #206
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #15

> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […] This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again?

Virtual machines are still the abstraction. Each Lambda/Fargate (serverless Docker) runs in its own VM.

But it's a "micro" VM now ..

rolls eyes

Re: Deno raises $21M

#256

Post by swyx »

wperron wrote: post #142
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See now that's interesting - All of those have very out-there brand reach and recognition but who knew they were using Deno, nobody heh. Okay, then, so it's a bit under the radar but ticking away down there, hence the raise. Fairplay.

If you're not following those companies' offerings then it stands to reason you haven't heard about it but all three of them did broadcast pretty widely that they were using Deno, I would assume quite a few people were aware of this.

yup, can confirm nothing about it was hidden (good on them, but better for deno)

Re: Deno raises $21M

#257

Post by chucky123 »

mrkurt wrote: post #81
vincentmarle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surprised it's only 21M. Indeed, especially when you compare with a company such as Supabase (which is working on way less interesting technology imho) who just raised $80M: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31328783

Deno probably would have raised $80M if they'd raised the same time Supabase did. Investors got quite a bit more tight fisted between January and April.

Good point.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#258

Post by alephnan »

vcryan wrote: 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…

> its founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer-famous

I agree here, but

> 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.

If I'm starting a new project, Deno will be compelling if it means zero configuration with sufficiently sane defaults. It's like Rails vs Ruby. With Node.JS, you can pick and choose then configure things like TypeScript, but then you have to manage configuration files for TypeScript, linting, and all these things not relevant to the app code.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#259

Post by chucky123 »

danielovichdk wrote: post #183

I read half and thought "how did this get any funding". Who validated this idea and with what measures?

Mainly because of Ryan who created nodejs. If you have a good track record, investors will throw money at you anyways.

Not being pessimistic about this though. Imho Deno seems like a solid improvement over nodejs.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#260

Post by hombre_fatal »

javajosh wrote: post #254
hombre_fatal wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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…

>Python, Ruby I like js too, but both python and ruby are much better languages. It's just that js won distribution, which means it won adoption, which means you have 10MM devs smoothing it's rough edges. Just to take one language feature, consider pythons list and map comprehensions. js has nothing like that - but it also has 10 high quality libraries that do that and more, like lodash. Consider also the ridiculousn…

Well, they asked why someone would use JS if there were other options, and I'm saying that I don't think Ruby nor Python are better languages than JS. Part of that is due to their bolt-on async vs JS async everything, part of that is due to TS, but there's more.

For example, you bring up Python's collection comprehensions, but I could easily point out Python's gimped lambda support and thus poor FP abstractions and the need for a special comprehension abstraction.

I don't think it's worth arguing about. But I had to chime in before someone thinks there really are no objective nor subjective reasons why someone might prefer Javascript. I do.

> then [X] is the best.

Btw, there is no best. There are only trade-offs.

One of my points is that you can't say something is the best. The only thing you can do is enumerate the trade-offs that made sense for you, and much of that is only personal/aesthetic.

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