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• Dark is a tool that provides a debugger-like feature without the need to turn on a debugger or add instrumentation. |
• The feature works by storing values throughout the program, allowing users to see the current or historical value of any variable. |
• The feature is similar to Redux's rewind debugging, allowing users to step through different states. |
• Dark has been rewritten several times, including from Elm to ReScript (formerly BuckleScript) and from OCaml to F#. |
• The language switches were due to changes in the ecosystem and the need for better performance and immutability. |
• The Dark team has written several compilers to switch between different languages and frameworks. |
• Rust was experimented with but not chosen for Dark |
• Paul Biggar explains that not every language is suitable for every person or circumstance |
• F# was chosen as the primary language for Dark due to its OCaml-like syntax and large ecosystem |
• Dark is intended for general-purpose use in cloud and backend applications, not for embedded systems or high-performance tasks |
• Writing Dark in Dark is not a priority, as it introduces infrastructure risk and is not necessary for the platform's core functionality |
• Using Dark for its intended purposes, such as hosting and collaboration, is considered more valuable than writing the language itself |
• The importance of "living in the real world" and using the language for its intended purposes is emphasized |
• Dark code is used for querying, not SQL, and is compiled into Dark |
• Dark does not currently support using existing databases like Postgres |
• The goal of Dark is to be a fully integrated system, not just a query language |
• Dark has a source-available license, but is not open source |
• The license allows for contributing to the Dark community, but does not allow running a company on a personal instance of Dark |
• There is a business continuity plan in place, including a promise to open source Dark if it is shut down |
• The license was written by Heather Meeker, a well-known open source lawyer |
• The problem with nuanced opinions is that many people aren't interested in middle ground, and some individuals may be more open to proprietary solutions. |
• The distinction between open-source and proprietary software, and the potential for a toxic community in open-source projects. |
• The decision to make Dark source-available rather than fully open-source, to encourage contribution and community involvement. |
• The desire to distance Dark from the "zealotry" aspect of open-source, and create a more inclusive and community-driven ecosystem. |
• The target audience for Dark, which is primarily developers building web applications and SaaS startups, rather than language nerds or enthusiasts. |
• The potential for a business model where users pay for the infrastructure they use, rather than a flat fee or project-based model. |
• The importance of having a clear and sustainable business model that aligns with the value provided to users. |
• Considering alternative pricing models for Dark, such as per-user fees, to make it more appealing to smaller businesses and individuals. |
• The concept of a "freemium" model, where users can access a basic version of Dark for free, with paid upgrades for more advanced features. |
• The idea of separating business-facing features from developer-facing features, as advocated by Jim Lindenbaum, to create a more appealing pricing structure. |
• Paul Biggar's thoughts on the future of Dark, including the possibility of it being a small, hosted platform for building apps, rather than a large, billion-dollar business. |
• The current state of Dark, including its recent layoff and the fact that it is currently a solo effort by Paul Biggar, who is unsure of his long-term plans for the company. |
• The importance of achieving product-market fit for Dark and the options that will arise from it, including the possibility of scaling the platform or keeping it small. |
• Dark is a community-driven project with source availability and GitHub issues/pull requests accepted |
• The project has a community that can be hopped into and questions asked |
• The project offers a fully-integrated solution for coding |
• The host is interested in seeing the project succeed and encourages listeners to try it out |
**Jerod Santo:** So I'm joined by Paul Biggar... You're a founder of CircleCI, and now you're working on Dark, which is a combined language editor and infrastructure to make it easy to build backends. Paul, welcome to the Changelog! |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, thanks so much for having me. |
**Jerod Santo:** Happy to have you. Well, tell us the story, start us off. From CircleCI to Dark. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. The ideas behind Dark came when I was working at CircleCI. There's a lot of seeing the world adopt for continuous delivery, and looking at the programming languages we use, and how difficult it is to add cloud into them, looking at how teams build things, and looking at how hard it is to build yo... |
Then I left Circle in late 2015. I remember I was massively burnt out; startups are hard, and I made lots of mistakes as a first-time founder, that led to more incredible burnouts... So I took 18 months off. Then towards the end of that I started thinking "What is it that I'm going to do next?" A lot of the things that... |
**Jerod Santo:** So you have these three aspects of Dark that you say in the tagline - it's a language, it's an editor, and it's infrastructure as well. So... Building a language is hard, making editors is hard, and of course, infrastructure is also hard... But even conceptually, what's the win of combining these usual... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. It's kind of funny, we find it really hard to describe what Dark is... Because as you say, it's a programming language, it's an editor, it's infrastructure, soon it'll be a package manager as well... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, and a lot of people have the Why. And the Why is what Dark is not. So the thing that Dark is not - it's not setting up Kubernetes, it's not like setting up serverless, it's not CI/CD pipelines... There's in fact a zero-second deploy in Dark, there's no waiting for 15 minutes, or whatever, there's... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[04:15\] Backups? \[laughs\] |
**Paul Biggar:** Databases, queues, all that sort of thing. It's all just built-in, so you don't have to think about "Oh, where am I going to spin up this thing? How am I going to get the code from here to here?" It's all just sort of like handled for you... And the way that we're able to do this is by integrating all ... |
You actually have to build in all this additional stuff to make sure that this thing actually works when you deploy it, and you can't do that with languages that aren't designed for it. And I don't just mean languages here, but I mean \[unintelligible 00:05:04.12\] the infrastructure - it's all sort of designed for thi... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So can you tease it apart? I know it's tightly integrated, but can you use Dark the language without using Dark the editor? |
**Paul Biggar:** No. Absolutely not, no. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. It's the whole kit and caboodle. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, and that's the advantage. To give you a couple of the reasons that people like Dark... One of them is this thing that we call deployless. It's an instant deploy of any code that you ride. And obviously, that sounds dangerous, right? We perhaps have memories of writing PHP in 2001, where it just d... |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, no syntax errors -- you've obviously never seen me write code, because I can find a way... I can find away. But apparently, the editor just says "No, that's just not gonna..." What, you just can't hit the key, or how does it work? |
**Paul Biggar:** It isn't text. Most programming languages - there are text files, and then there's a parser that parses it. In Dark, when you type in the editor, everything that you type is a valid part of the program. You might think, "Oh, what happens when --" You know, it's sort of easy enough; I put it in double-q... |
And then the major thing that we have to enable that sort of change is called -- well, they're a feature flag, so a very common thing... They're specifically integrated into the language to give you a new place to write new code, without affecting the old code. Basically, just lots of safety rails built into the langua... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So what is Dark's sweet spot? Is it web apps, is it CLIs, is it games? What typically would you build with Dark? |
**Paul Biggar:** \[07:59\] I think the truth is today that there is no sweet spot. And this is something that I've come to realize over the last year, that Dark was not quite ready for anyone, and I think that is still the case today. So really, the kind of people who are using it today are people who are experimenting... |
Where we intend to get to is that you will built everything in Dark. Everything can be built 10x easier with these things... But we still lack a lot of things that you actually need in order to be able to do it, such as things like user management, and package managers, and that sort of thing being built, in the way th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So you began at 2016(ish), it's 2021, it's in private beta... It's a long road, and it sounds like you said it's still somewhat experimental, you're still trying to flesh things out... When you started Dark, did you know the long and windy road that's in front of you, or did you think it'd be an... |
**Paul Biggar:** I didn't. So we officially started in about late 2017. It's been a little over three years now, and we expected it to be much, much quicker. But what Dark was in the early days has changed significantly. In the early days, Dark was sort of a nodes and edges sort of thing, where you dragged things, and ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Paul Biggar:** So we were experimenting with lots of different ways to be able to write code... And all that got discarded and went to things that looked a lot more like what people expect coding to look like... But we managed to keep the advantages of what we were looking for - that deploylessness, and I'll talk pro... |
There's been a couple major inflection points... When we got our first user really building something, when we got the first person to build their company on Dark, when we built a new editor and suddenly people were going from "I can't use this thing at all" to "Oh yeah, I understand how to build in this." |
I think that the next major inflection point is when there's a package manager and people can instantly use third-party vendors, and Stripe, and Twilio, and all that sort of thing directly from it... But yeah, it's been a long road, for sure. It's a platform that -- this journey will never be done, I suppose. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. I've thinking about this concept recently, because motivation is so perishable... And that old Thomas Edison saw invention as 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration... I just thought about how hard it is to persist and to persevere on an idea over time. The moment of conception is amazing; that's w... |
**Paul Biggar:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** And I wonder with you -- it sounds like these inflection points maybe help, but how do you renew motivation, when days go by, weeks, months, years, and you're still toiling away towards this end... It sounds like maybe you celebrate some small wins along the way, or what? |
**Paul Biggar:** Well, I think the main thing is that I take the motivation from users. We have about 7,000 people who have tried Dark, and it's a small community that have sort of stuck around on our Slack. There's 40-50 people whose names I know, there's a couple of people I talk to regularly, and there's new people ... |
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