The Dark language and coding platform launched this week, and I couldn’t be more excited. (I had half a mind to fly to St. Louis and see them launch in person at StrangeLoop.) For a while, I’ve been following what Paul Biggar (founder of CircleCI) and Ellen Chisa (a product leader whom I respect) have been building in Dark: a product to democratize software development and make it easier for everyone, particularly for folks who haven’t previously coded before. The frustration Paul expresses in his launch video –- about infrastructure and today’s delivery process getting in the way of delivering code – resonated deeply, particularly when I think about how we used to “deploy” in the early days of web software engineering (FTP-ing PHP files to production). Obviously, that was risky.
Today, however, in the name of risk reduction, we have complicated CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes and rolling deploys, thousands of lines of AWS CloudFormation and Chaos Monkey to kill it all, and a million other extraneous guardrails that developers today need to learn just to get something into production. An end-to-end, low-friction developer experience such as what Dark is providing is certainly appealing, not just for new developers, but for old folks like me who would like to program again occasionally but find today’s frontend and backend stacks daunting.
In this post, I’d like to give my thoughts in just three areas: what did Ellen and Paul and their team build? In what way could they reasonably go to market? And also – to address some of the early criticism about Dark, e.g. that it’s a closed ecosystem and not open source – does it matter? Are there are other valid criticisms and how could they overcome them?
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