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Dart language

dartlang.org

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Re: Dart language

#371

Post by pacala »

dextorious wrote: post #322
pacala wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voiture: transport des personnes du point A au point B Car : move people from point A to point B

Yeah, you didn't really get the point. Again. Systems language and web language are not just a different name for the same thing --like Voiture and Car. And, no, that their function defined in abstract and in totally generic terms is the same, doesn't make them the same thing. "move data from point A to point B" can be said for any programming language. As such, it's not particularly enlightening when comparing a lan…

Avion: transport des personnes du point A au point B

Boot: Menschen bewegen von Punkt A nach Punkt B

We are talking past each other :) Here is your first comment interpreted through your second one. There is no reason to have different languages, but it's OK to have different jargon.

Re: Dart language

#372

Post by nailer »

WayneDB wrote: post #341
nailer wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't even have the tolerance for braces. You're already indicating blocks via indentation. - Requiring a redundant mechanism to mark blocks - Possible introducing situations where code looks differently than how it executes is all very mid-90s. python was the first to fix this, but yaml and coffescript do to. In particular, Dart will have to compete with mindshare from .coffee, so at least should be bet…

Yeah, but with significant whitespace you create problems like "spaces vs tabs". I like semi-colons for the same reason that I prefer statically typed languages - exactness.

Sure but when I hack python (which is a lot, as it's my day job), I rarely encounter this (YMMV of course). It seems everyone knows not to use tabs in most languages, python is no exception.

Re: Dart language

#373

Post by grimlck »

The incorporation of bignums is interesting - i'm curious how does that works when compiling to javascript (where double is the only numeric type)

does that mean all integer math is emulated? Long emulation is slow enough in GWT, but you have the choice of using int if you don't need a long.

Re: Dart language

#374

Post by nerdzero »

After seeing so many negative comments primarily focusing on the syntax and verbosity of the language, I felt compelled to create an account to try and get some understanding of why this is.

The way I understand it, a terse syntax is useful in getting something working quickly. However, this is not necessarily the best code when it comes to performance or maintenance. Adding "boilerplate" code not only makes the compiler/interpreter more efficient, it also makes the job of the maintainer much easier. Personally, it takes me less time to figure out what a particular piece of code is doing if the datatypes of variables and return values of functions are obvious.

Dart seems to understand this well and so makes typing optional which is useful for prototyping but then also allows you to refactor and explicitly include types to gain performance and improve maintenance for production code. Am I missing something? If not this sounds pretty exciting to me.

Re: Dart language

#375

Post by cromwellian »

starwed wrote: post #368
cromwellian wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If JS can be evolved, why has it taken over a decade, and still nothing much of substance? I think Javascript is much like Java, it is too hampered by concerns of remaining compatible with existing legacy semantics. Whenever you see a language where the only thing they can add is "syntactic sugar" it means they are unwilling to consider functionality that would break the underlying legacy VM assumptions, and that mea…

More than syntactic sugar is being added, for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_typed_arrays

I'm super familiar with type arrays (I helped port GwtQuake which was one of the first apps to ever use them in large measure), but type arrays are an add-on API that doesn't change language semantics. Something that would change language semantics would be to offer early-bound namespaces. Early-binding would increase performance while simplifying VM implementation and make tooling easier.

Re: Dart language

#376

Post by hbbio »

The current Dart buzz shows merely two things: (1) There is a need for better languages to program web apps. (2) Google marketing power is impressing.

But, technically what Dart introduces is nowhere new. Have a look for instance at Opa (http://opalang.org) which is open source and already does more than Dart. If you take out the marketing bulls... that it is going to replace JavaScript, when it now just compiles into JS as many other do.

Re: Dart language

#377

Post by pacala »

BrendanEich wrote: post #320
pacala wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Brendan is missing is that the contest is not closed between JavaScript and Dart. The elephant in the room is the huge and growing mobile space where ObjectiveC and Java rule. It's not about "Works only in Chrome", it's about "Works only on iOS/Android".

What you are missing is the bleeding obvious: the topic of that other thread where I commented was Google's leaked memo about Dart as "replacement" for JS -- that memo created "the contest". Obj-C and Java are not browser-supported. Sure, there's a native apps vs. web apps contest. Native is winning? Not according to Fred Wilson (AVC) and other observers. Who knows, really. We're speculating, but let's find out by do…

With all due respect to the awesome work Mozilla is doing, I'm not seeing in your response anything about mobile-native-jshtml5 platform. Funny enough, Microsoft is currently promoting jshtml5 as a platform harder than Mozilla is, and given their platform unification message, that ought to include the mobile/tablet space as well.

Edit. I'll have to retract the above. BootToGecko is the mobile platform from Mozilla. It would be awesome to market it harder as such.

Re: Dart language

#378

Post by dextorious »

pacala wrote: post #371
dextorious wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you didn't really get the point. Again. Systems language and web language are not just a different name for the same thing --like Voiture and Car. And, no, that their function defined in abstract and in totally generic terms is the same, doesn't make them the same thing. "move data from point A to point B" can be said for any programming language. As such, it's not particularly enlightening when comparing a lan…

Avion: transport des personnes du point A au point B Boot: Menschen bewegen von Punkt A nach Punkt B We are talking past each other :) Here is your first comment interpreted through your second one. There is no reason to have different languages, but it's OK to have different jargon.

I might not get the joke. Do you mean this ironically?

There sure is reason to have different programming languages, and it's called specialization (see: necessary engineering compromises).

My first comment says: two objects having the same generic functionality, does not mean that one and the same object can implement their specific (non generic) functionalities.

My second comment says: the same thing, basically.

Re: Dart language

#379

Post by rictic »

cromwellian wrote: post #350
ootachi wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I mean, with Unix, most people are running a single implementation: Linux Kernel, and no one really cares about Open Solaris, or Darwin anymore." Nobody cares about Darwin? Really? I mean, in terms of hacking the kernel, sure, but tons of people are running Darwin. The POSIX standard is more important than ever. "On mobile devices, loading a lot of Javascript is expensive" I keep seeing this assertion that bytecode…

Who said anything about Java bytecode? Java bytecode != bytecode. "I don't want this at all. That's too close to ActiveX for comfort." It has nothing to do with ActiveX. It has everything to do with dead-stripping code and targeting particular browsers the way GWT and Closure Compiler do today. In particular, Javascript VMs today always parse JS even if it's already been cached, hasn't changed, and is loaded from the…

I don't know about GWT, but in my experience closure compiler does not produce different output for different browsers (though it does strip dead code).

Re: Dart language

#380

Post by edsrzf »

cletus wrote: post #346
chintan wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, this is not a "break away" approach as originally indicated in the leaked memo. One of the biggest pain point in web dev is the inconsistent DOM implementations. I was imagining some sort of DOM-less, HTML5 Canvas-based UI controls. And something about the "Web", Semantic Web/URIs or a new approach to programming on Web. This is NOT a break away language in any sense - its more re-packaging.

I'll stress that it's early days for Dart. Go was announced in 2007 and only this year is going to a version 1.0. I don't know what the timeline is for Dart but I will say this: 1. If anyone is capable of the long sort of time frame that something like this can benefit from--event requires --it's Google; 2. If there is anyone who's qualified as a domain expert in Javascript generation it is, by virtue of GWT, Google;…

Small correction: Go was announced in November 2009.
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