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Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

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Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#31

Post by kreetx »

MrLeap wrote: post #6

In high school, I think I worked for a company that has prior art on deployless software. We wrote php and perl directly on the prod server with vi through putty. No deploy necessary! What's old is new again I guess.

Well, with compiled languages and multiple servers it does get a bit more complex.

But yes, these online editor products have been created before and afaik they rarely get significant traction. Yet, even a small user base might make it profitable, so it does make sense, and hence these companies.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#33

Post by bin0 »

twic wrote: post #21
shinryuu wrote: post #4

Personally I’d be surprised if this startup is around in five years

Right. It sounds like a fun thing to build. But i'd love to read an honest explanation from an investor of why they funded it. Dark raised 3.5 million USD from eight funds, which is under half a million each; maybe that amount is so small that a VC will invest it just for fun?

Trust me, getting VC money isn't magically easier at small scales. There's a reason most businesses die under-capitalized.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#34

Post by d2mw »

notjesse wrote: post #23
mroche wrote: post #18

> If you build your application in Dark’s language inside of Dark’s editor, the reward is you can deploy it automatically on Dark’s infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without worrying about all of the typical underlying deployment tasks. > ... Ellen Chisa, CEO and co-founder at the company, admits that the Dark approach requires learning to use her company’s toolset, but she says the trade-off is worth it becaus…

Agreed. It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws lambda’s are now. You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?

Lambda is the antithesis of frictionless development, most of your life is invested in figuring out the Lambda way to do things, just like App Engine before it

"I just need to run this function every 10 minutes"

.. (3 blog posts later)

.. (1 lunch break later)

.. (5 Git commits across 3 repos containing a mix of CloudFormation, CloudWatch and Terraform, 3 new IAM policies and 12 S3 buckets with completely unmemorable names)

.. 5pm, oh shit, I haven't actually written the function yet

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#35

Post by inlined »

vbsteven wrote: post #12

After the Parse.com fiasco I am not touching a high-vendor lock-in BaaS ever again.

I’m admittedly biased (early Parse employee, but not there by shutdown). Which part was a “fiasco”? As far as turndowns go I thought it was pretty damned fair: one year notice, a live data migration pipeline to self-hosted mongo, and an open source server implementation with a free license. Facebook even paid employees to continue working on the OSS components for a while till the community became so abusive that they moved elsewhere. The only thing I think could have been smoother is if Parse appIds were indicated by subdomain rather than header, which would have allowed switching over without client code changes and minimal cost to Facebook.

And does Dark even have the same sort of risk? It says your code runs on Google Cloud, which sounds like you get to walk away with your own backend if they shut down. Parse considered AWS an implementation detail, not a feature.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

twic wrote: post #14
adrianN wrote: post #10

I now almost nothing about Dark, but I don't understand why it is necessary to do this with a new language and a new editor.

I remember doing this in Smalltalk in about 2010. Multiple editing one image, which was running live!

I remember doing this in PHP in 2007.

Seriously, if you quint, it sounds like "cPanel + integrated PHP editor for cloud era".

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#37

Post by gcb0 »

mroche wrote: post #18

> If you build your application in Dark’s language inside of Dark’s editor, the reward is you can deploy it automatically on Dark’s infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without worrying about all of the typical underlying deployment tasks. > ... Ellen Chisa, CEO and co-founder at the company, admits that the Dark approach requires learning to use her company’s toolset, but she says the trade-off is worth it becaus…

You are right. Reported this submission as spam.

It is a closed invite-only product.

They try to mislead saying that the only downside is learning a new language. Every good programmer loves to learn a new language. The actual, real downside is license/lock-in/ownership.

...Their website is hosted on Medium, not gitlab/hub. I rest my case.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#39

Post by mroche »

d2mw wrote: post #27
mroche wrote: post #18

> If you build your application in Dark’s language inside of Dark’s editor, the reward is you can deploy it automatically on Dark’s infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without worrying about all of the typical underlying deployment tasks. > ... Ellen Chisa, CEO and co-founder at the company, admits that the Dark approach requires learning to use her company’s toolset, but she says the trade-off is worth it becaus…

> offset the deploying mechanism and control (probably to varying degrees) to a third party that’s dependent on another third party This sounds exactly like working inside any big company, and all that pre-canned infrastructure is a huge benefit to any project It will be interesting to see what they've built in the cold light of day, and whether it delivers. I'm apparently not nearly as pessimistic as others on this…

For small things you don’t want to think about or tiny/solo teams, I could see a use case for this. But the product has to be really, __really__, fantastic for bigger groups to consider the control trade off.

I’m not bashing on the product, I’m heavily apprehensive of the model for the situations I’m involved in. I can say with certainty it’d never make its way into my current place of employment for several reasons.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#40

Post by ummonk »

maximilianroos wrote: post #30

This is hardly "emerging from stealth". This was a blog post from February! https://medium.com/darklang/the-design-of-dark-59f5d38e52d2

Okay good. I was feeling so confused because I could have sworn I saw them posting like a year ago about paying a few early startups to dogfood the Dark platform as it was being developed.
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