Dark (lang) - removing accidental complexity of programming

So Dark is a programming language or maybe more precisely: an integrated ecosystem for writing and running code. Its features:

• a language
• a structured (?) editor
• a testing framework
• feature flags
• a database that is easy to use
• API-interface wrappers
• has built-in version control that semantically understands your code
• has a hosting platform (that you pay for I believe)
• a logging/error reporting system

And more?

They haven't publicly given many details, just one blog post and their homepage.

Some quotes:

We want to make it possible to build a complete scalable app in an afternoon. We’ll make it 100x easier to build applications and bring the ability to write software to a billion people.

and

We’re creating a new programming language, tightly integrated with an editor, compiler and PaaS, to allow engineers to build distributed applications using high-level primitives. We abstract away individual machines and low-level distributed systems code to:

• Generate and run scalable infrastructure for you.
• Use APIs as easily as if they were functions.
• Remove the deployment step entirely.

I remember reading somewhere that someone was already using Dark for a project (as a beta tester) but can't find that anymore.

I really hope this turns out to be awesome 😎

Update (2019-04-11) I wrote another post on Dark

Comments

[rhymes]

Hi Niels,

this is what I wrote on Twitter a few days ago:

rhymes

@rhymes_

@mipsytipsy @paulbiggar @ellenchisa wow! I'm both intrigued and skeptic about this at the same time 😅. Definitely can't ignore this though. I kept thinking about Squeak :)

Subscribed to the mailing list, thank you!

21:32 PM - 28 Feb 2019

0 2

It was in response to this:

Charity Majors

@mipsytipsy

i've tried to explain to lots of folks what @paulbiggar and @ellenchisa are doing, cause i'm super amped about it.

it's like "software entropy vs paul and ellen, FIGHT" and my money's on them. read on to see if you are a good beta user ☺️ medium.com/darklang/the-d…

18:49 PM - 28 Feb 2019

8 42

I can't but wait to see what they are cooking. It reminds me partly of Squeak, partly of the Erlang movie, partly of other things.

I quite agree about the fact that software complexity needs to be scaled down one way or another.

[Jan Wedel]

This definitely sounds interesting. However, I think they have to show that it actually works and not only in very simple use cases. Usually a new frameworks all languages they have some very concise examples but when it comes to more complex tasks, it’s going to be complex as well to implement it. They say that there is an integrated database for example and other integrated infrastructure components. I’m wondering how it will work when you need to interact with existing data bases or other interfaces for example.

But thanks for pointing us to this new technology anyway! I’ll definitely look into it once they post some examples Or documentation.

[Niels Bom]

I wrote another post because they've released more info.