Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

True! Google Maps was a revolutionary use of AJAX. However, that is totally orthogonal to if JS was being written like JS, or like something else.

> This criticism was leveled at Dart because as I argued

Except I wasn't leveling that criticism at Dart. I'm talking about Google efforts in general at the time. You can see it in GWT, you can see it in the first generally accepted JS styleguide (done by Google), and you can REALLY see it in the articles and efforts of Google at the time where person after person laboriously tried to make JS _behave_ like Java (so we're not talking syntax). The late 90s and early aughts were a battle between those that wanted to recreate Classical OOP in JS and those that wanted JS to be what it has ended up being.

I don't even KNOW Dart to criticize it about anything, but I knew what I was seeing from Google at the time and why I wasn't swayed that they were creating something that would be accepted by the community and other browser makers.

> (there was a time, believe it or not, when static typing was disparaged by frontend web-devs)

...and it continues to this day in many corners - the issue (generally) isn't static typing but instead the cost/benefit involved - are enough runtime errors prevented to cover the cost of me informing a type system. There's a reason JS has spread so far - the time cost of static languages is just as real as the runtime risks of dynamic, and pretending that this equation should always favor proven correctness just results in more work being done in the dynamic camps.

It's not really an architectural difference, I'd agree (outside of isolates vs. threads): Dart is mostly about ergonomics compared to other class-based OO languages. Unification of class, interface, and mixin; method cascades for “free” fluent interfaces; the syntactic support for sync and async generators along with async/await, really transparent (binary, not just source-level like C#) getters and setters; named and factory constructors; the whole deep consideration of const-ness, etc., are all ergonomic features, not major changes in architecture / paradigm.

Ok, but just to be clear, at no point did Google actually try to replace JavaScript with Java.

>You can see it in GWT

Oh come on. GWT was transpilation tool with a built-in component framework. It solved a real problem for specific use-cases and was primarily adopted by enterprise developers. It was never a replacement for JavaScript.

>and you can REALLY see it in the articles and efforts of Google at the time where person after person laboriously tried to make JS _behave_ like Java

Can you provide an example of this? I have no idea what you're referring to.

>The late 90s and early aughts were a battle between those that wanted to recreate Classical OOP in JS and those that wanted JS to be what it has ended up being.

And Google was a non-factor in the development of the web technologies and standards in the late 90s and early 00s (Chrome wasn't released until 2008. Ajaxy Gmail was released in 2004). Also, nobody gave a crap about JavaScript in the 90s and early 00s (Crockford's JS:The Good Parts wasn't released until 2008). Maybe you're thinking of the development of ActionScript 3.0 which had OO constructs and was supposed to be a replacement for JavaScript before (I believe) Microsoft balked and left Adobe hanging. Which is a shame because AS3 is also superior to ECMAScript 5 and world would have been better with AS3 in the browser (and don't get me wrong, AS3 is very quirky language).

But regardless, the whole "Google is trying to replace JavaScript with Java" was pure paranoia not grounded in fact.

> the issue (generally) isn't static typing but instead the cost/benefit involved

You can build in optional typing if you really want to (AS3 had that). Having said that, I cannot see what time you lose by enforcing type constraints. And dynamic languages are not faster or more productive. At best it's a no-op. At worst you're dealing with runtime errors which are 100x painful and costly than dealing with a compile-time error.

>There's a reason JS has spread so far

It's the lingua franca of the web because it's the only language supported by major browsers. That's why it spread so far, not because it is a great language. In fact, the plethora of transpilation tools should give you a clue how shitty this language is.

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