Dark Lang with Ellen Chisa and Paul Biggar

Dark Lang is a programming language that is tightly integrated with the cloud. 

Dark takes an opinionated approach that most developers are going to want to run their applications in the cloud, and this perspective influences how Dark looks at deployments, IDEs, exception handling, and other aspects of software development.

Paul Biggar is the founder of CircleCI, and ran the company for eight years before leaving to found Dark with Ellen Chisa. Ellen is a software engineer and the CEO of Dark. Paul and Ellen join the show to give their perspective on modern software engineering, and why it was time to build a new high level language that assumes the presence of a cloud.

It is difficult to get programmers to adopt a new language. It is even harder to get those programmers to pay for products built around that language. But the timing could be perfect for Dark. 

Software development is undergoing tremendous change–and many of these changes work to Dark’s advantage, such as the growing adoption of feature flags, low code tools, and sophisticated continuous delivery workflows. Whether or not Dark is a success, it is a bold project, and the team is working on something they believe in.

We also discussed AWS–and whether the largest cloud provider has an obligation to contribute back to the open source community.

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Transcript

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