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

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#61

Post by bendbro » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:15 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #22

I've been coding since I was a kid, for about 33 years. I actually think they are right about all of this stuff. Including the part about combining everything together into a holistic solution. It sounds like a terrific idea. Unfortunately most people seem to hate good ideas. Especially if they represent a significant change from the status quo. And programmers are afraid to touch anything that's "easy" or moves away…

I think that is a consequence of "culture" being an important deciding factor in software engineering decisions. Culture causes a company to value "agile development" over "waterfall" or "strong-typing" over "weak-typing" without having solid definitions or objective arguments backing their reasons. I would like to see the day when culture is no longer a deciding factor in my work, but I don't think it's coming. People don't share foundational beliefs, and even if they did, the gap between reasoning from their foundational beliefs to their base programming beliefs is vast. Even if we all simultaneously underwent a shared spiritual experience that transformed all our foundational beliefs to a shared common set, we'd still need to reason our way upward to beliefs about programming, and that would be fraught with error. So even in a field as black and white (or red and black, if that's your preference) as programming, we will still have arguments, there will always be naysayers, we'll have conservatives who refuse to stop practicing COBOL, progressives wasting time on Frilly-BottomJavascriptContainerLib-2.0, and we'll all still be wasting time trying to get Intellij to build in our dev environment properly.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#62

Post by mirekrusin » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:15 AM UTC

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?

I think they actually do much more, they go really deep, it's like your project is huge ast, deployed when saved/compiled/typechecked, it's like big, persisted ast tree; i think this is how they store things - as ast, ast deltas, there are no text files at all. I'm not even sure if you can save your sourcecode if it doesn't compile. Compiled (and "locked") code means deployed code. I don't know how they do deployment of single code as multiple instances - maybe they don't support it at all? ie. everything is stateless with context comming in as input? I don't know. Everything seems "dark" about this project (no reference, no examples, no playground, your code belongs to them, can't use git etc.). But it's interesting, will keep an eye open for this one.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#63

Post by mirekrusin » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:15 AM UTC

tnolet wrote: post #16

This reminds me a lot of the Salesforce Apex platform where the language, runtime, datamodel, hosting and all infra is part of one package. But Salesforce has a very specific niche, this seems to be for general purpose web dev and I’m pretty sure it will be a hard time getting people to switch.

Also Wolfram is similar.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#64

Post by twic » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:21 AM UTC

I have a hunch that Dark won't generalise well. It might be good for making simple data-backed web applications. But a business of any nontrivial size has more than just simple data-backed web applications.

Do you use Dark for part of your business, and traditional tech for the rest, in which case you now have the problem of integrating your traditional stuff with Dark's black-box infrastructure?

Or do you build an MVP on Dark, then migrate on to traditional tech when you grow, in which case you now have the problem of migrating your entire business?

Or do you bet that Dark will pull more rabbits out of their hat, and you won't need to migrate?

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#65

Post by twic » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:21 AM UTC

Looks like one thing the infrastructure doesn't automate is using the right SSL certificate:

https://hellobirb.com/

(that company is an early adopter mentioned in https://medium.com/darklang/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-fina... )

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#66

Post by flukus » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:33 AM UTC

kreetx wrote: post #31

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.

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

Compiling (and basically anything) can be done as a cgi script (https://github.com/RhysU/c99sh), I bet you could go a long way with that on a network drive or with an rsync daemon.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#67

Post by omnimus » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:33 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #65

Looks like one thing the infrastructure doesn't automate is using the right SSL certificate: https://hellobirb.com/ (that company is an early adopter mentioned in https://medium.com/darklang/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-fina... )

SSL certificate automation is the hardest part of any stack.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#68

Post by mirekrusin » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 7:42 AM UTC

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.

Beause everything is integrated, compiled code roughly means deployed code, they need strong, sound type system and many constructs are not allowed because the way it runs. I don't think there is a way to use threads for example because concurrency is handled above you.

I think importing something (require/import) is referring to deployed code. They blur the line between saved and deployed code. You need to have dedicated language+runtime to support such a different model.

I think their model is roughly - stateless functions only (context/state arrives as input), references (require/import) resolve to hash of ast they import; this hash is deployment "address" of function. In that sense all code is static/immutable/saved/deployed. Every time you import something, you're importing rpc wrapper, ie: 'foo = require('foo')` becomes `Foo = require(hashOf(astOf('foo')))`. I don't know if any of this is correct because there's no documentation, I don't know how they handle things like restarts or is it possible or not to have more than one deployed instances.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#69

Post by jasim » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 8:01 AM UTC

I'm very excited about this idea and have even asked for an early access invite.

These days I don't care about being in full control of my back-end stack - I just want to build something and ship it with least hassle as possible. I don't want to deal with provisioning, infra as code, containers, orchestration, message queues, load balancing, autoscaling, build configs and sundry.

I just need a statically typed functional language in which I can do that, which Dark is - it seems to have an Elm/OCaml inspired language.

Being fully tied to their platform with no alternative to migrate away to is the least pleasant aspect of the product as it stands today. But the product isn't even public yet - it is a difficult problem space that is badly in need of innovation and simplification - and many things are yet to be figured out. I'd be charitable to that aspect and see what as an industry we can learn from what Dark is doing.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#70

Post by viraptor » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

maximilianroos wrote: post #59

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/571733273996488…

I'd really like to be positive about it, because there's an interesting concept hiding inside, but... They neither let me play with it, not address the very basically questions I'd ask. It's purely marketing material for a product at this point.

They talk for example about all the great save-is-deploy things and first-class feature flags and I'm still waiting to know how do I not destroy the production database with one typo and how does staging isolation work in this environment. And how do you revert changes? Again, feature flips they talk about are not it.