Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model • Hacker News Board

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#51

Post by chvid » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

They really need a good bottom-up example showing what Dark is and why it is different from ssh-ing into a production server and fiddle with some php-scripts.

They write about feature flags, non-text code and a fully integrated environment. So what they are trying to do is different however these ideas has been around for some time (Smalltalk/Self/some databases) but have been not been adapted by the industry of practical software development.

Probably because the implementation was never really good enough.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#52

Post by MrLeap » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 6:53 AM UTC

zhoujianfu wrote: post #48

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.

Wait, did you work at DreamHost?!

Nope, it was a COBRA administration company.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#53

Post by mirekrusin » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 6:55 AM UTC

Radical approach - they flip the whole thing upside down. The biggest challange is not new language or ide per-se imho - but detachment from git, this has implications ie. it seems open-source hostile (you can't use it for open-source code, or am I wrong?); what about libraries?

Technically very interesting.

Practically I'm not sure it'll fly, at any complexity project development means in big part playing around locally before pushing ideas up. On dark platform the code seems to be in compiled = deployed state only, or am I wrong? What about documentation, how is testing done, benchmarking, integration tests, if the system goes crazy, is there a way to actually stop it? What about recovery from backups? Reverting to past history code? After reverting is the new code still available so it can be fixed before next deployment?

The scope they're claiming is gigantic, they must be taking compromises somewhere. There's no way is all unicorns and rainbows.

However if they manage to execute it well, the potential is huge - they can create marketplace for libraries/services, they can become appstore+github+aws in one for execution-ready solutions (libraries, services etc), which could be huge.

Wolfram does something similar. Salesforce as well. Dark seems similar but for webdev, it's like serverless/lambda v10.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#54

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

andr wrote: post #42

I've played with some early betas of Dark and I must say being deployless may make a good headline, but there are many more-exciting features. There's visual programming, a concise OCaml-style language, a unique pub-sub mechanism baked right in, and integrated database support. It's a really fresh approach.

[deleted]

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#55

Post by majkinetor » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

andr wrote: post #42

I've played with some early betas of Dark and I must say being deployless may make a good headline, but there are many more-exciting features. There's visual programming, a concise OCaml-style language, a unique pub-sub mechanism baked right in, and integrated database support. It's a really fresh approach.

OMG, visual programming! Instant turn-down, it simply doesn't and can't work ever.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#56

Post by adrianN » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:05 AM UTC

d2mw wrote: post #34

notjesse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When you've written the Terraform boilerplate once, making a second lambda that runs every ten minutes is really smooth.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#57

Post by twic » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:05 AM UTC

mattbillenstein wrote: post #45

twic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The founders are well-enough connected to get this sorta funding...

Right, and Paul Biggar founded CircleCI before this, which has been pretty successful!

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#58

Post by inlined » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:08 AM UTC

choiway wrote: post #49

So it's a lame version of dot net / Azure?

Per another article, the editor doesn’t even allow syntax errors. Seems like they have a tight pipeline built around AST manipulation, which is actually novel. I’m not sure I understand why that took a new language though.

Disallowing some side-effects? Ensuring all valid code follows their rules? Avoiding being dragged along by other languages authors’ changes? Something to do with the deployment pipeline, which implies a runtime requirement?

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#59

Post by maximilianroos » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:10 AM UTC

The tone here is _extremely_ cynical.

Before you jump from thinking a specific feature is wrong, to asserting the whole project is a waste of time: please take a moment to consider where your broad assertion might be wrong.

In the words of Sam Altman: "it's easy/fun to say every new startup you hear about is bad. you will usually be right. you will never be successful."

https://twitter.com/sama/status/571733273996488704

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#60

Post by twic » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:14 AM UTC

nudpiedo wrote: post #25

twic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

besides second player gaming emotions, how did it turn out? was it value there aside of pair programming?

I only tried it once, and the technology was pretty flaky at the time. I don't think it really went anywhere.

The focus was on the fact that you could have multiple people editing a single codebase at once, rather than on doing it in production. Indeed, you wouldn't have to do it in production, you could work on a shared development image. That was definitely a very interesting sensation, having a whole team working in a single space; like pairing but much more so. Lots of calling out to other programmers to ask them what they thought, or to suggest something. You could all work on parts of an idea at once, so you could try things out quickly. But there was so much overhead in making sure you didn't tread on each others' toes.

This doesn't seem to be the emphasis in Dark at all. In fact, i don't know what Dark's story about collaboration is. It seems to be much more about the instant deployment, and all sorts of sci-fi tooling to make that safe.