71–80 of 174 posts
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.
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 the…
The sunset window was indeed fair and as you described they provided a clear migration path to self-hosted mongo and eventually the open source server.
The main problem was the vendor lock-in where our code base was completely tied to their platform and the migration which cost a lot of developer/ops time was forced upon us. Instead of improving our product we had to spend our time and money on the migration to the open source server that was still in its infancy.
After running the open source Parse server for a while which was not without its issues we decided to rewrite the product in Java/Spring/Postgres and now we are free from the lock-in. If AWS decides to quit we can move it over to Azure or GCP without too much problems.
My original comment was not a stab at Parse but a word of warning for choosing BaaS services. Parse allowed us to ship an MVP that turned into a V1 in very little time. But that productivity came with a hidden cost. A cost that nearly killed the company.
Currently there is very little known about the Dark platform and language. From what I see it looks a lot like a next-generation Parse or Firebase and I am very cautious about adopting something like that again.
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'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 functi…
Is there some information about the language somewhere? I don't seem to find any information from the site.
This is hardly "emerging from stealth". This was a blog post from February! https://medium.com/darklang/the-design-of-dark-59f5d38e52d2
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…
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 functi…
> 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. Is there some information about the language somewhere? I don't seem to find any information from the site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
The fiasco was not on Parse's end but it was ours for locking ourselves into their platform. The sunset window was indeed fair and as you described they provided a clear migration path to self-hosted mongo and eventually the open source server. The main problem was the vendor lock-in where our code base was completely tied to their platform and the migration which cost a lot of developer/ops time was forced upon us.…
> 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?
Separate from anything else about Dark, it appears to fundamentally avoid that problem.
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…
No idea what that tweet is meant to say though. People who are critical about startups are never successful? Really? You can easily argue for the opposite.