Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:17 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #139

kbd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publ…

    import engine.*;
    import static content;

    import static java.lang.System.out;

    public class Demo {
        public void main(String args[]) {
            var content = createContent();
            var save = content.createHero("blah");

            while (true) {
                var start = System.currentTimeMillis();

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

                var stop = System.currentTimeMillis();
                var elapsedMilliseconds = start - stop;
                out.printf("Generated %d dungeons in %dms\n", count, elapsedMilliseconds);
            }
        }
    }

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:28 AM UTC

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…

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:29 AM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #215

realusername wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was Python's killer app? Not a killer app, but the fact you have so many ML frameworks > What is Rust's killer app? That's clearly Servo. > Go? It was docker which really made Go take off, it was their first big platform. > Kotlin's? Android compatibility, before that it was a niche language not being picked up much.

Python already won before ML was a thing.

Post by MarkMc » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #206

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…

Off topic but... are there any plans to adapt Flutter for desktop apps?

Post by nailer » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

emmelaich wrote: post #189

nailer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typo when removing the others. Thanks for the spot. Maybe a forEach or map might be more appropriate for all those future programmers anyway though.

While you're there, you may as well indent everything after the "while(true)"