alt Hacker NewsCongrats 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.
Replies
> You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million
Mozilla alone invested an eight digit amount in Rust.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.