Congrats on Dark for making it this far!
Relevent timeline:
https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019)
https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today)
TL;DR: We’re taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to shrink Dark’s team, and to change how we build both the product and the company."
So where do we go from here? Right now, the team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years, and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the community much more in Dark’s growth, and slowly rebuild the team at a pace appropriate to the product’s maturity, focusing on a small, tight team that can wear many hats.
Start of a new rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020)
Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ (2022)
seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?: https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023)
No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ (2024)
Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which is a look at PL funding models:
https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/
Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of 100 million).
Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and what their funding model will be going forward.
> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets
Which is why you should build your team in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, etc. There's a competitive advantage to hiring outside the SF tech bubble today. Over the last 5 years the network effects in SF have begun to evaporate.
Agreed in hindsight, but at the same time there was no place else where a couple of 20-somethings could grab a cup of coffee with a VC and walk away with a handshake deal for $2 million dollars. That just didn't happen in Denver et al in 2014.
Does that still happen today? Anecdotally there has appeared to have been a massive funding crunch for pretty much anything that isn't virtual healthcare or AI since COVID passed, though I'll be the first to admit I'm not in the know on a lot of these things.
My anecdata is the opposite. I know people getting funding for non-AI projects. The most "nontraditional" one I can think of is Nautilus [0].
[0]: https://www.nautilus.quest/
We (darklang) are fully remote! One person in Vermont, one in Algeria. :)
Must be nice making SF rates out in Algeria!
This is a pretty weird take. Talent in Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago etc. is not a whole lot cheaper than in the Bay Area. Employees are getting a large (majority) of their comp as options or RSUs, so that makes the delta even smaller, you're just talking base salary.
If that's "make or break" for you, then something is wrong. There are plenty of reasons to want to have a distributed workforce (larger talent pool in general, passionate employees) but saving money is the least important one here.
> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million
Mozilla alone invested an eight digit amount in Rust.
Meanwhile Elixir had no such backer.
What do you consider the financial and developer contributions of Dashbit née Plataformatec, Dockyard, and Fly.io?
Dashbit and Fly.io were announced in 2020, Dockyard started using elixir big time in 2015~.
Elixir started in 2012. Phoenix in 2015. Certainly none of those companies had millions to spend on Elixir at the time.
My point was that José and Chris being continuously employed working on the language and Phoenix respectively (by the companies I named) are probably considered a form of commercial backing by most people. If you want to split hairs about specific timing or magnitude of investment, that's kind of nitpicking IMO. It's not grassroots at basically any point.
José founded Dashbit after Plataformatec got acquired but up until ~2020 Plat directly funded the creation and iteration of the language, with it originating as an internal research project.
https://elixir-lang.org/development.html
José Valim created Elixir in 2012 as a Research and Development project inside Plataformatec.
https://plataformatec.com/
Dashbit José Valim has openened a new company to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production.
Those companies employ a useful fraction of the language core team, too.
Ericsson did a lot of the heavy lifting with BEAM.
The same could be said about Darklang's underling language, the browser, and javascript.
I don't think open sourcing is going to fix their adoption issue. Like the other comments mention, you need to be worth the time investment to gain traction. If Dark was truly as revolutionary as it was marketed as, it wouldn't have had problems staying source available, IMO. Folks will pay or put up with whatever it takes to be in the ecosystem (such as CUDA).
I agree it won't fit it, but IMO it will remove one of the barriers to adoption. The problem with doing something revolutionary, is that it's only going to be revolutionary in some ways, and it has to compete with things that are mature in ways you are not. And the original version (now called Darklang-Classic) was quite immature in an awful lot of ways that made it difficult to build on.
That's being addressed with the new version of course!
Mojo was also less ambitious in a lot of ways. It blows my mind the Eve and Darklang guys raised so much money without a lot of momentum. I'd think you'd go the other way, start an Open Source project, spend 10+ years gaining a community and refining it, then raise money.
In both of the above cases, the founders just got bored of their project before they found PMF.
You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon, because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential upside. The problem was, and this is what Paul found out too, they wanted to see typical startup metrics before they'd put more money in, and it was always going to take more than $2-3 mil. You just can't demonstrate those with a concept of a language.
Do you think Unison will suffer the same fate?
No, I mean these low bus factor languages don't really die as long as the BDFL keeps working on it. Biggar keeps Dark going through thick and thin. Chiusano likewise with Unison. Even if their Unison public benefit corp runs out of money, Chiusano could probably do what Dark did and buy the IP. With my programming language I'm making sure that there is no IP and therefore nothing to own. It would probably be easy for Biggar to just wash his hand of Dark as well but it takes guts to keep going in a direction you know it right, and so I'm happy to see the project continue.
I'm glad to hear it as I'm very interested in Unison. (I've been watching them from the sidelines for ages.) For those not in the loop, it's a language where your code is stored on disk in AST form, not textually. The AST representation is smart in many ways - for example, renaming a function is an O(1) operation, regardless of how often the function is used. They also have a way to serialize Unison functions and send them over the wire to other Unison programs, which is pretty sick. Their site is here: https://www.unison-lang.org/
(I'm mostly interested in it because I think it would be an ideal language for videogame scripting & modding)
FWIW we also store ASTs, not text. We offer many of the same benefits. Some day (soon?) I'll write up a full comparison between the two, because it seems a common ask.
I'd love to see where BABLR falls in that comparison. We're trying to take the same kinds of tricks and bring them to every programming language at the same time
I can’t see teams adopting Unison (or similar languages) without a way to store code in Git.
Maybe the editor can load text and do structured editing. Maybe the runtime can send functions across the network. Great. But not using Git for storage and review is just too alien for most teams to even consider.
> it's a language where your code is stored on disk in AST form, not textually.
Doesn't this result in vendor lock-in for editing the code?
Paul had created Circle CI, so I can see how investors would at least be trusting. Rightly so, I think, as he's not just talented but he knows talent.
Mojo's promise is the same code, but faster.
They were planning some language extensions but it's more like a compiler project than a programming language project.
The truth is, most developers don't want to learn a new language.
They will jump through extra hoops just to use their favorite one (e.g. Airflow).
Successful languages appear when there is an extreme market demand (C++ providing OOP over C) or, more commonly, a hot new platform that people want to get in on (JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin, C#, ...)
For most people, new syntax / semantics is considered a negative and there needs to be some massive upside to overcome that.
There was also Wing cloud (fka Monada) and there’s Mojo by Modular (https://www.modular.com/mojo.)
Feels like two types of companies raised money: - Companies trying to couple the cloud with a programming language. - More recently, companies trying to couple GPUs with a programming language/alternative to CUDA.
Will be curious how this generation goes.