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Comment by projectramo | Hacker News Reader

If I were to take advantage of this opportunity, my main question would be about darklang.

While it is interesting to be paid to give some feedback to a system and maybe learn something, it would be interesting to know just what it was.

Consider: if you told me darklang was a python based language that was built on top of django/AWS and automated a lot of the work around it.

Consider: you told me darklang was a JSON storage model, with a react-like front end.

Consider: you told me that darklang was based on RUST in the browser.

All these things would appeal to very different startups. It would tell me that the work I did would not be wasted and I could take the basic models (ORMs, etc) if the project failed.

That's why I think it would be useful to say a little more about the stack around darklang. Even if it is "totally new", what is it based on?

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Good question. Conceptually, Dark is most similar to your django/aws example.

There's a lot more types, though in a really good way. We're aiming for all the advantages of static typing, coupled with all the advantages of dynamic typing. For example, you use the same types all the way from DB schemas to API validation.

> We're aiming for all the advantages of static typing, coupled with all the advantages of dynamic typing. For example, you use the same types all the way from DB schemas to API validation.

Sounds like what Microsoft tried to do with the .NET ecosystem, but with cloud integration (which Microsoft should be doing for their own cloud) and API validation.

Someone needs to actually succeed at doing this. Most of the type-checking/inference problems in this domain are decidable -- it's really a tooling/tooling integration problem. Creating a single unified tool instead of having developers clobber together libraries (JSON schema validator, ORM, MVC framework, deployment workflow for all of that, etc.) would be a huge value-add.

Suggestion: code example/screenshot/workflow video on your homepage, and a link to your homepage in the advert. Nearly every programming language/library out there has a concise "hello, world" example on their homepage. Nearly every software development tool has a screenshot of sorts on their homepage. Those examples are worth a million words. Even an appropriately caveated "Wizard of Oz" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment) demo would go a long way.

Thanks! If you have any things you think we should read, would love to see it.

Internally, we build a Real World app (https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld) and some other stuff. It taught us a lot but not nearly as much as a real developer will :)

Thanks for clarifying.

Can you share what language darklang uses (or what language it is based off of)? I imagine if it is a language the startup already uses, it would lower the risk of trying it.

TBH, we took inspiration from a ton of different places, including a lot from Clojure, Python, Elm and Rust, as well as Rails and Django.

Dark is probably closest to an ML (like OCaml/ReasonML or Elm), with some interesting twists that we think will greatly increase productivity and decrease complexity, most notably tight integration with its editor and platform.

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