alt Hacker NewsI’ve watched the demo video, and gone through the discussion here but I’m still not sure what the core use case for Darklang is. It feels like I'm missing something obvious.
Can someone explain the practical problems this is solving better than existing tools like Python or other backend stacks?
Also, genuine question: how was the team able to work on this for 2+ years without revenue or traction? Was there still funding left, or was this a side project during that time?
The theory is that because Dark offers a nice interactive environment when you have a request come in you can inspect the data, "fix up" your code, rerun it quite smoothly. Completely removing the deploy question. Really good for glue projects IMO. Think stuff like google scripts (though google scripts are much more miserable to ues)
Many moons ago I had tried to play with Dark and unfortunately the surrounding language stuff really didn't work out for me though. I really liked the concept but ultimately I think I would have preferred if they had just built out the environment on some other language.
Even just lua would work decently well for their use cases, if paired with a good "standard" library.
The UI was fun to use, in any case.
EDIT: to be clear I'm a bit of a type weenie but for the stuff Dark could be good with you really sometimes just want to look at the JSON and poke at it, and your type systems aren't going to be helping you _that much_