I like it. And if they make it work great on the server as well, that's a big plus. A google supported node.js would be great.
Even better, a Google supported node.js with actors.
Dart language
111–120 of 504 posts
Re: Dart language
#112Hmm. A little underwhelmed so far.
I guess that was the intention, they bet on familiarity as well. Most changes are subtle, not necessarily a bad thing.
Re: Dart language
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're not mandatory, they should be out altogether unless required. Making them just optional is a path straight to js-land weird edge cases.
That's not true. Go, Python, Ruby and Scala all have optional semicolons without insanity. It's just that JavaScript's specific semantics for semicolon insertion (instead of newline elision!) are batshit crazy.
> That's not true. Go, Python, Ruby and Scala all have optional semicolons without insanity.
Python (and Haskell) solve that issue by not using semicolons unless required. The Dart code in the examples is full of semicolons, that makes it an "optional semicolons language" akin to javascript more than a "possible semicolons language" akin to Python or Ruby.
Re: Dart language
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This looks like Java for Javascript, if that makes any kind of sense. It completely does. And I love that it manages to be completely incoherent with Go, the other "Google Language". That's so symptomatic of what google does on that front.
Go is a systems programming language, not a web programming language. It's like saying Javascript is incoherent with C.
Yes, science forbid they be coherent on the exact same feature such as a type specification.
Do you even read what you write?
Re: Dart language
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well, it's hard to get that much better than that. var greeter = Greeter() there, no need for `new`. Alternatively, var greeter = Greeter.new() or var greeter = greeter new if it's not acceptable to have arbitrary callable objects. > it's more Smalltalk under the hood. The speed and wide-spread use of Smalltalk with the regularity, flexibility and terseness of Java's syntax? That sounds like a recipe for success.
> there, no need for `new`. Agreed. I didn't say you couldn't get better at all, just not much better. I'd personally be in favor of ditching new (or conversely making it a method on the class). > The speed and wide-spread use of Smalltalk with the regularity, flexibility and terseness of Java's syntax? Oh, you. You may be right. Making a new language is crazy, especially if you're aiming for widespread adoption. Sti…
> Agreed. I didn't say you couldn't get better at all, just not much better.
I strongly disagree, it makes away with a keyword and magical syntax, that is much better.
> Making a new language is crazy, especially if you're aiming for widespread adoption.
That's not what I'm saying, I like new languages, and I like interesting new languages, but it pains me to see you defend (or even work on?) Dart, which so far looks even worse on the programming-language-progress continuum than Go does. It barely makes any progress on the very language it's supposed to replace.
Re: Dart language
#116Mozilla's Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, on the Dart memo leaked a few weeks ago: A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent" compared to having the Dart VM in the browser. Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM. So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. W…
That statement came with no benchmarks or numbers, no knowledge of the Dart VM and it's relative performance to V8, and no knowledge of the Dart to JS compiler and what kinds of optimizations it does. If you run Google's closure compiler on JS, for example, in some cases, it produces a very significant speedup than hand-tuned hand-written JS, so saying "never be decent" is a pretty strong claim to make.
The key part is (...) compared to having the Dart VM in the browser.
It seems pretty obvious to me that unless Google fucks up the VM implementation, it'll always be much faster than compiling to JS, which doesn't even implement the same concepts - let alone semantics - of Dart. In fact, if VM is not much faster, why would they have it at all?
Being faster than handwritten JS is irrelevant, because the VM will be faster still, and that's the difference he's talking about.
Re: Dart language
#117Aaaarghhh! 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.
In terms of a language, it looks like a horrible step back into the 90s. What we need is the language to be terse, and clean with lots of built-in functional utilities for manipulating data structures and objects/modules/classes/etc. Ideally, take the best bits from ruby/coffeescript/coco/python and couple them with high quality tooling. Many of the most innovative minds are flocking to these languages for good reason.
Re: Dart language
#118Funny to read all these comments just a few minutes after the announcement. I bet nobody had enough time to explore the language in any significant way. Yet very strong opinions already.
Re: Dart language
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This looks like Java for Javascript, if that makes any kind of sense. It completely does. And I love that it manages to be completely incoherent with Go, the other "Google Language". That's so symptomatic of what google does on that front.
Weird that a systems language and a web language are different, huh?
I said "coherent" not "identical". They could be coherent on shared features, such as type specifications or variable declarations, which have little to do with the "class" of the language. They're not.
Re: Dart language
#120From 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 d…
Could you enumerate what actually made you hate it? Familiarity is not necessarily a bad thing, and it seems it was one of the main goals of the language.