> In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company, as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was not going to attract new investment. In our discussions, we agreed that continuity of the product was in the best interest of the users and the community (and of both founders and investors, who do not enjoy being blamed for shutting down tools they can no longer afford to run), and we agreed that this could best be achieved by selling it to the employees.

Any other examples of that? I'm particularly interested in that for this kind of software product.

Making hard connections between the editor and the lang was interesting also. Seems like they have moved away from that.

Hope there is a easy way to set it up locally, i was really intrigued when they first launched

Also looks like it required their cloud setup to run, you previously couldn't run it locally. Now you can, so I think it's moving in the right direction!

Turns out, the messy bits are the things that turn your vibe coded Twitter clone into a full time operations job…

Not blaming. Not everyone is good at everything or wants to make time for it.

But a good, well structured landing page with great, real life, examples and good hierarchy backed by awesome docs will make a ton of difference adoption wise. I hope.

Dark's structure editor looked promising. I'm really disappointed that the project moved away from this because a hosted visual programming environment felt like the whole value proposition in the first place.

Was it the pivot to AI that killed this, was it issues with the design of the language or was the structure editor just not as useful as it seemed?

On a personal note, I'm curious around the move to F# as the implementing language and wonder if there will be ports to other languages now that it's open source.

Goodbye Dark, Inc. – Welcome Darklang, Inc

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290357

Relevent timeline:

https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019)

https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to extend runway I guess to today)

  TL;DR: We’re taking a longer term approach to building Dark. As part of this, we’ve made the difficult decision to shrink Dark’s team, and to change how we build both the product and the company."

  So where do we go from here? Right now, the team is just me. I am committed to realizing the full vision of what Dark should be. Dark is financially healthy for many years, and there is time to think and to plan. I plan to involve the community much more in Dark’s growth, and slowly rebuild the team at a pace appropriate to the product’s maturity, focusing on a small, tight team that can wear many hats.

Start of a new rewrite: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-v2-roadmap/ (2020)

Two years later: https://blog.darklang.com/backend-rewrite-complete/ (2022)

seemingly a new pivot to "all in" on AI?: https://blog.darklang.com/gpt/ (2023)

No news, one year later https://blog.darklang.com/an-overdue-status-update/ (2024)

Would be interesting to the Dark team to revisit this post, which is a look at PL funding models:

https://blog.darklang.com/how-to-fund-caramel/

Building programming languages is hard especially when you're not backed by a company. I think Eve (I worked on that one) and Dark were the two major VC funded languages, and at this point I don't think that's a good model for funding this kind of thing. You need waaaaay more that 2-3 million; most of that is funneled directly in to SF landords pockets. Something more like the Mojo people have gotten is what it takes (they've raised upwards of 100 million).

Anyway I can't wait to see where Dark goes in the future, and what their funding model will be going forward.