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Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

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Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#131

Post by EugeneOZ »

drb91 wrote: post #118
EugeneOZ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trait is not a type, Any is just a custom trait. Types: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ch03-02-data-t... You can create trait with name "Magic" or "Fuck" and it will not mean anything. Pointers is not a type also.

Ok, type bound. You can still easily pass around data whose type is not concretely defined at the compilation step. Unless you’re arguing that the dynamic type is actually static, in which case this whole conversation seems semantically pointless.

2 hours ago I answered it already. If you're another person who wants to convince me that Rust has same thing as Dart's "dynamic" type, then please make my code example to compile (without modifications, for literally ANY type, as in Dart) and I will say I was wrong.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#132

Post by sbjs »

munificent wrote: post #97
sbjs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use instead of JavaScript. This had a lot of backlash from literally everyone, I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. Only after a few years the Dart team changed courses and said "never mind about that VM-inside-Chrome…

I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this. Personal opinion time: Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it. They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a deli…

A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app, a concrete tangible thing that that language can do better 100x better than any alternative. Like how Ruby had Rails or JS had browsers or Python has ML. That’s not to say you can’t do other things with these, just that their competitor is good enough and has momentum and mind share. It sounds like Dart now has Flutter and I think that’s going to be a huge deal moving forward.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#134

Post by hota_mazi »

sbjs wrote: post #132
munificent wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this. Personal opinion time: Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it. They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a deli…

A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app, a concrete tangible thing that that language can do better 100x better than any alternative. Like how Ruby had Rails or JS had browsers or Python has ML. That’s not to say you can’t do other things with these, just that their competitor is good enough and has momentum and mind share. It sounds like Dart now has Flutter and I think that’s…

> A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app,

I don't understand why this myth is still around.

C++ never had a killer app to start its momentum.

Neither did Javascript. Nor Java really (or maybe applets, back in the days?).

Languages can succeed on technical merits alone if they come out at the right time and fix real problems that programmers experience on current mainstream languages.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#136

Post by ergothus »

macspoofing wrote: post #107
sbjs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use instead of JavaScript. This had a lot of backlash from literally everyone, I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. Only after a few years the Dart team changed courses and said "never mind about that VM-inside-Chrome…

I agree. In addition because Dart shared some superficial similarities with Java, some people just assumed it's Java and criticized the language for it. For example Dart variable declaration is of the form "String a" vs "var s:string" - the former syntax looks like Java so Dart must be Java. It certainly felt like people were willing to 'pile-on' criticism because they felt that JS ecosystem was threatened. The langu…

I think your points about Dart being treated unfairly are legit. OTOH, Google certainly invited criticism - early Google efforts on the web were VERY "let's make JavaScript into Java", and as the JS community matured this attitude was viewed with less and less favor. I think it's notable that the community that DID end up having strong influence in the JS world (Node & npm) had much more of a Ruby background than Java.

None of which invalidates Dart, but I know I was less than excited when Dart was announced as it seemed more Browser Wars crap rather than an improvement. Nowadays I'm more inclined to hold Google's history of not supporting products consistently (or at all, in most cases) against Dart than anything about the language specifically,

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#137

Post by sbjs »

hota_mazi wrote: post #134
sbjs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app, a concrete tangible thing that that language can do better 100x better than any alternative. Like how Ruby had Rails or JS had browsers or Python has ML. That’s not to say you can’t do other things with these, just that their competitor is good enough and has momentum and mind share. It sounds like Dart now has Flutter and I think that’s…

> A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app, I don't understand why this myth is still around. C++ never had a killer app to start its momentum. Neither did Javascript. Nor Java really (or maybe applets, back in the days?). Languages can succeed on technical merits alone if they come out at the right time and fix real problems that programmers experience on current mainstream lang…

These days it's mostly about apps, because apps are the main thing that facilitate the transfer of $$$. In the 80s and 90s, enterprises were full of $$$ and needed fast and safe languages for writing all their software. C++ came out to solve this need, and Java came out saying it could do it better. Today enterprises are moving many of their internal tools to the web. Enterprises don't need apps per se, but they do need the tech needed to build internal apps and apps to bridge between them and their partners. Consumers are using desktops less, and mobile or web more. Apps are basically the current de facto software "product". But a lot more goes into making apps today than 30 years ago. An example is how most apps need ML for spam protection and recommendation algorithms, or they are instantly going to be considered outdated and behind the times.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#138

Post by solidr53 »

deforciant wrote: post #14

I mostly spend my days writing Go (previously Python) and when I tried Dart I really liked it. Could basically start coding and be productive without even looking at language documentation (VSCode has a nice Dart plugin which tells you what to do and what not to do). In my case, I was trying out Dart because of a Flutter (probably majority of people are now looking at Dart because of Flutter) and I found it really fa…

> If you want to try building a mobile app then definitely go for Flutter+Dart, even if you don't need to support both Android and iOS I think it's just much more easy to start with than alternatives (RN/Swift/Android Java).

How is it easier? You can literally start your React Native development by opening up https://expo.io and scan a QR on your phone.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#139

Post by munificent »

kbd wrote: post #124
munificent wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this. Personal opinion time: Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it. They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a deli…

I think a lot of what people found off-putting about Dart is that Google already recently came out with a new language that has become very successful. Announcing another one, which at first glance looks like yet another curly brace language not that far from Java, was a step too far for people to be interested. Nowadays, the only thing driving Dart seems to be Flutter, which again is head-scratching. Like, "Flutter…

I could be wrong, but I don't believe the existence of Go was much of a problem. Go and Dart are very different languages aimed for very different use cases. If anything, I think Go helped us because we could point to it as a successful language that Google hasn't cancelled.

> not that far from Java

This is something that hurt us, I think. You can write Dart code that looks a lot like Java, and many of our early public examples did. To make matters worse, for no good reason, Dart 1.0 didn't do any type inference, so even though you could use "var" for local variables, doing so would give you a worse user experience.

But you don't have to write Java in Dart. You can write really elegant, clean code in Dart in a way that Java doesn't enable. You don't have to stuff everything inside classes. We've always had nice terse lambdas, higher-order functions, collection literals, etc.

Here's a random little program of mine:

    import 'package:hauberk/src/engine.dart';
    import 'package:hauberk/src/content.dart';

    main() {
      var content = createContent();
      var save = content.createHero("blah");

      while (true) {
        var watch = Stopwatch();
        watch.start();

        // Generate a dungeon at each level.
        var count = 0;
        for (var i = 1; i = -1) count++;
        }

        watch.stop();
        print("Generated $count dungeons in ${watch.elapsedMilliseconds}ms");
      }
    }
It's not the most beautiful code in the world, but I do think it's a good bit simpler and cleaner than it would be in Java.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#140

Post by solidr53 »

monocularvision wrote: post #120
dangjc wrote: post #102

Flutter seems like the killer app that could revive Dart. In comparison: Javascript For mobile with React: no AOT compile. Relies on loading the entire JS VM which adds startup time and can require bundling a large library on Android. Cannot easily author customized components that render at native speeds. C# For mobile with Xamarin: No hot reload. Dart having its origin as a JS interpreted language had the foundatio…

The main negative with Flutter on iOS is that your app ends up looking like an awful Google app instead of something native.

Yeah, and in Flutter it's actually impossible to use system native UI libraries like navigation etc. So if you would like to build a simple app using each platform's native components, you'd have to build them yourself. (And update them as iOS/Android updates their UI).
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