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I saw the line "Our goal is to make coding 100x easier, which we believe will allow a billion people to build software" in this essay about the new Dark programming language and my immediate instinct was to write something sarcastic and cruel, HOWEVER, nopic.twitter.com/G353tevBtV
Dark, as described in the essay (https://medium.com/darklang/the-design-of-dark-59f5d38e52d2 …), is more of a platform/toolchain than a simple programming language. Web/mobile dev is absurdly complicated right now and Dark's objective seems to be to absorb as much of that complexity as possible. That's decent
I agree that the complexity is excessive and intimidating. I doubt anybody agrees that the complexity is one hundred times what it should be. I think the multiplier is closer to 2 than 100, but I could certainly stand to have my job made twice as easy
I think the creators of Dark could be underestimating the essential complexity of the task they're aiming to make easier. Once a little of the accidental complexity is streamlined/absorbed, it's not too long before you start removing/hiding things that we actually need
But this in itself is not a bad thing. A simpler platform which is strictly less capable can be much more accessible and, then, popular. Limitations can drive ridiculous creativity. That's the best reading of Dark, I think
When they talk about having a text editor which simply doesn't allow syntax errors, I'm reminded of Scratch and Logo and whatever that other teaching language is where there's no such thing as a syntax error at all
Software development isn't going to be a hundred times easier, and a billion people aren't going to become software developers. This is nonsense optimism. But Dark doesn't seem likely to actively damage the world, so I'm going to hold off on the withering scorn for a bit
No matter how easy the task of "inputting instructions" ever becomes, the role of a programmer isn't to type, it is to convert vague intent into specific intent. A true shift requires getting people to think about what they *really* want.
Being a clear and thoughtful communicator is also inherent to many lines of work.
The two red flags I see from reading the blog post are "Jack of all trades" and "leaky abstraction": they want to solve *all the problems*, for *all the programmers*, and somehow remove *all the decisions* and *all the disadvantages*. That's utopian thinking, and doomed to fail.
In particular, this phrase: "Dark won’t support this sort of application for many years". A realistic project would say "Dark will never be the best choice for this". To simplify, you have to define what you're leaving out, not aim to "eventually" include everything.
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