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Dart language

dartlang.org

61–70 of 504 posts

Re: Dart language

#61

Is this effectively GWT 3.0? The project page is very unclear, so I ended up on Wikipedia instead. Wikipedia actually has a leaked memo that seems to do a really good job describing the purpose of the language. Specifically, the language is meant for three environments: server-side, compiled to JavaScript client-side, and fast native client-side once there is browser support. (The main goal is better performance on t…

> Also, what does the "structured" in "structured web programming" mean? I would guess it's a reference to the optional static typing. There's a growing movement behind static typing and functional programming that resembles the movements behind dynamic typing and OOP of a decade ago...

I'd guess it's also a lot about class-based vs. prototype-based. The latter often leads to messy architectures. It might be an intrinsic characteristic of prototype-based design, or because 99% of people learn OOP with a class-based language, I don't know.

Re: Dart language

#62

Aaaarghhh! It is full of semicolons. Is it really necessary in the 21st century to create a language that terminates lines with semicolons? I am sure I have seen some other languages in the past that get by just fine without them.

The language isn't done yet. Now is the time to let us know if you want semicolons to go away. I know some of us on the team do too, but public interest will help a lot.

they should not be mandatory

Re: Dart language

#63

Aaaarghhh! It is full of semicolons. Is it really necessary in the 21st century to create a language that terminates lines with semicolons? I am sure I have seen some other languages in the past that get by just fine without them.

The language isn't done yet. Now is the time to let us know if you want semicolons to go away. I know some of us on the team do too, but public interest will help a lot.

I want the semicolons to go away. Braces too.

Re: Dart language

#64
post #26

A face-washed JavaScript with classes, interfaces and such stuff. I was expecting something more syntactically close to Go, or at least to Python.

Meanwhile, I've been slowly eliminating my usage of `class` from all of my CoffeeScript code. I've found that my code is much more reusable, far less prone to `this` bugs, easier to reason about, etc. I used to be a huuuge OOP guy, but now I rarely find a use for classes...

Prototypes are fine for a language like JavaScript. They keep things simple. I'd prefer that CoffeeScript (and Dart, of course) implemented a decent syntax for prototyping, replacing the JS mess, rather than trying to disguise them as leaky and half-featured classes.

Re: Dart language

#65
From whatever little I see, I am already hating it :-) This looks like Java for Javascript, if that makes any kind of sense. We are in the year 2011, PL design has progressed so much since 1990 that such an anachronism is unpardonable. I sincerely wish that companies like Google focus on hiring the right kind of person for designing programming languages.

What is frustrating is that there are so many people who can do this job right, yet we are stuck with amateurish programming languages designed by companies like Google. Please try and hire people like Oleg Kiselyov, Simon Marlow, Erik Meijer or some one from the possible hundreds who have worked deep in PL theory for literally decades. On the face of it Gilad Bracha has great credentials, credentials that would make the HR folk happy but one look at some of the stuff he writes and we know things are not going to be good.

http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/06/types-are-anti-modular.h...

I think Phil Wadler gave him more respect than was due in the comments :-) Microsoft hired Anders Hejlsberg for .Net which I don't think was a good idea, he is a great engineer but not a PL theory expert. They however "rectified" the situation by hiring Erik Meijer later and his impact via LINQ and F# and improvements in C# is obvious. Not to say that Hejlsberg is not good, but Meijer is better. Getting back on track, I may be wrong but Dart makes me groan. It is one thing to design such a language in 1990, but quite another thing to do it in 2011.

Re: Dart language

#67
post #37

If you're going to go to the trouble of creating a JavaScript replacement, making something more like Java is the wrong way to go IMO. CoffeeScript is a lot more palatable.

[deleted]

Re: Dart language

#69
post #9
post #3

The "hello world" example is incredibly uninformative. What does that have to do with "structured web programming"? Where is this printed out on a web page? Does the console output there correspond to the html output? Or some other console?

It's actually runnable if you click the "play"-icon in the top-left of the code sample. The "Hello, Dart!" is written to a console emerging from underneath the code sample. https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi... is a more DOM-oriented version of the same program.

Hmm strange, I can't see the "play"-icon using FFX 3.6.23

Re: Dart language

#70

Aaaarghhh! It is full of semicolons. Is it really necessary in the 21st century to create a language that terminates lines with semicolons? I am sure I have seen some other languages in the past that get by just fine without them.

The language isn't done yet. Now is the time to let us know if you want semicolons to go away. I know some of us on the team do too, but public interest will help a lot.

I love Python. I prefer working without semicolons.

But from a new language standpoint, it's not worth dropping them. The ridiculous arguments that come out of it, the programmers who refuse to use the language because of it, they're things that can and should be avoided by using semicolons like most languages.

I'll never understand why programmers care so much about this, but hey, that's life.

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