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Dart language

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Re: Dart language

#441

Post by WayneDB »

BrendanEich wrote: post #415
WayneDB wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right" Abso-friggin-lutely! You should be thanking Microsoft and Internet Explorer for upping everyone's game. They're the ones who introduced XmlHttpRequest. You knoww, "ajax"? It's their browser and they can do what they want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If everyone else likes it though, tough l…

Must some historical fact or pattern of facts be "all good" or "all bad"? Grow up! Microsoft added XHR to IE when they gave Java the boot in a spat with Sun, in order to keep Outlook Web Express in working order in IE. Was that "all good"? Clearly not for Sun or Java! The browser wars phase I had no winners. Yes, IE's DHTML innovations such as innerHTML were a win, and Netscape should have agreed to implement and sta…

Wow, really? Grow up? Nobody said it was all good for everyone. I made a counter-point that was clearly as balanced as the original point.

Anyway, it really depends on your point of view. Personally I love the IE6 stagnation and other failures that affect the web such as the epic lameness of Javascript. Why? I think the whole platform sucks and I'm glad to see it fail and push people to build better solutions.

Re: Dart language

#442

Post by gf3 »

j-kidd wrote: post #193
secoif wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers care about it because it adds extra noise to your program. If you semantically, and naturally, communicate "end of statement" with a line break to human readers, why should you have to say it again with a semicolon to the compiler? Programming languages should focus on being DRY.

Semicolon makes it possible to do jQuery-style chaining with the least noise. I think frequent-backslash is uglier than always-semicolon.

Semi-colons do not enable this feature. Multi-line chaining works just fine sans-semis.

Re: Dart language

#443

Post by ootachi »

cromwellian wrote: post #396
ootachi wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modules, which are statically bound, are part of ES Harmony [1]. Please stop spreading falsehoods. [1]: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules

Sorry, I'm out of date, when ES4 was terminated, John Resig said this: "Some ECMAScript 4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony." Is static scoping the same as early binding? For example, it is guaranteed that any class layouts within the module are statically frozen and cannot be altered at runtime? If…

Exports from Harmony modules are frozen and cannot be changed at runtime. Classes are too if you use Object.freeze().

Re: Dart language

#444

Post by BobTurbo »

politician wrote: post #265
BobTurbo wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have little knowledge of the latest trends in programming languages, but if your example of a good PL theorist is someone who designed LINQ, then I am going to have to take your opinion with a grain.OfType(Salt).Where(m => m.Value.Contains(nothing)).ToList ().OrderBy(m => m.irrelevance).FirstOrDefault ();

Actually, you would write that query as: var q = from m in grains.OfType () where m.Value.Contains(null) orderby m.irrelevance select m; return q.FirstOrDefault(); which fits in 80 characters on one screen. From this post and your reply, it seems like the your complaint is that LINQ is hard to understand if you write it poorly. But that's true of most programming.

Yes if you write it like that, it removes one of my complaints, but it leaves the other. You now have inconsistency in the language because LINQ is basically being used as a new type of language added to an existing language. You are working with two languages at once. Why stop there? Why not add python to c#? And every other language. The super language that has everything from everywhere. It is a total mess.

Re: Dart language

#445

Post by rayiner »

rdtsc wrote: post #212
arctangent wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about the syntax - I was hoping for something more like Python. Perhaps this is by design, though? Presumably the syntax doesn't look too bad to people who spend all day writing JavaScript (i.e. the target demographic for this language). Presumably some bright spark will eventually write a Python-to-Dart compiler and then we'll all be happy :-)

> I was hoping for something more like Python. Me too! We already have a very readable, simple and elegant language, let's use that. Anyone know why that wouldn't have worked? (Not using the current CPython implementation but maybe the same syntax but with a different (web-only) set of libraries, that is...)

Because Python's semantics are fucktarded.

Re: Dart language

#446

Post by BrendanEich »

WayneDB wrote: post #441
BrendanEich wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must some historical fact or pattern of facts be "all good" or "all bad"? Grow up! Microsoft added XHR to IE when they gave Java the boot in a spat with Sun, in order to keep Outlook Web Express in working order in IE. Was that "all good"? Clearly not for Sun or Java! The browser wars phase I had no winners. Yes, IE's DHTML innovations such as innerHTML were a win, and Netscape should have agreed to implement and sta…

Wow, really? Grow up? Nobody said it was all good for everyone. I made a counter-point that was clearly as balanced as the original point. Anyway, it really depends on your point of view. Personally I love the IE6 stagnation and other failures that affect the web such as the epic lameness of Javascript. Why? I think the whole platform sucks and I'm glad to see it fail and push people to build better solutions.

"Abso-friggen-lutely" on top of "three cheers" lacks qualification about the thing you cheered being less than good for anyone. You were abso-friggen-lutist.

Anyway, the open web standards are not failing. Dart is not a clearly better solution. I get your point about XHR, but do try to take mine about the whole history being a mixed bag, including what IE did. We can do better.

Re: Dart language

#447

Post by ootachi »

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…

"They must also retain the original source as well as the parsed AST representations due to other semantics (toString()), which wastes gobs of memory on memory constrained devices."

Wrong. SpiderMonkey doesn't. It retains the bytecode only, throws away the original source, and uses a decompiler when toString() is used. V8 saves the original source, but that's its problem :)

Re: Dart language

#448

Post by robbrown451 »

BrendanEich wrote: post #437
robbrown451 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt that there would be a cost associated with hooking in Google's code. And I'll take you at your word that it's not NIH, even though a casual reader might guess that you might be a bit more personally invested in Javascript than you'd be in the various things that, say, WebM seeks to replace. Regardless, I'll leave your words to speak for themselves without further debating. I'll admit I'm a tad disappo…

You had better put up or shut up. I did not call anyone names. Cite my words if you can. As for defensiveness, that looks like your department.

Well, uh, I guess if you put it that way, I sure better....

Whether you want to debate whether the term "name calling" is accurate or not, I would suggest that the following fall astray of Hacker New's guidelines of "the principle here is not to say anything you wouldn't say face to face". Then again, I don't know.....maybe you are that way in person too.

"Grow up!"

"Such ignorance. Willful? You seem new around here, and you are not using your real name"

"How old are you, to never learn or else to forget this?"

"So your trollish commentary notwithstanding"

"I despair of your reading comprehension"

"Am I promising you a pony? No, but then you are not a three-year old."

"(or go back to school and learn how to argue)"

"Dart is jejune, knee-jerk, "

and of course:

"You had better put up or shut up"

Really? It seems you're quite a prominent figure to need to resort to that sort of schoolyard talk, but do as you wish. I'm not going to be baited anymore.

Thanks for javascript, though.

Re: Dart language

#449

Post by dasil003 »

edsrzf wrote: post #380
cletus wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank god. I was starting to think I'm getting old if 4 years goes by that quick.

Re: Dart language

#450

Post by magicalist »

BrendanEich wrote: post #423
cromwellian wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You accuse me of trollish behavior, yet resort to personal slights, asking how old I am? Irony. Did I ever question your age or intent? I am fully aware of Microsoft's behavior, but that still doesn't address the fundamental issue that language evolution within spec committees is painfully slow and the competing interests waterdown proposals. It happened to C++ and to Java too. It happens in our government as well, w…

We agree on Java the language being mismanaged. Especially in comparison to C# (see a recent InfoQ interview with Neil Gafter). But the JVM is in better shape. I despair of your reading comprehension, though, when it comes to what I have written about the leaked memo's Dash strategy. I never wrote that JS can be as fast at Dart-to-JS code as a native Dart VM could be. Not ever -- quite the reverse. Now if we on TC39…

I think if it wants to be taken seriously as a good force in advancement of the web, google does have to be aboveboard with its involvement in TC39 and put in significant effort there. Maybe they really should have put in more effort to pushing strawmen through (I wasn't paying enough attention a year ago to comment on that).

But are you suggesting that particular people at google should have been (forced to be?) more involved in TC39 efforts? I don't think you can force that (and someone like Lars Bak would probably just leave if he didn't want to do it). There are lots of language experts out there that are working on their pet compiler instead of helping with the next coffeescript variant. That's not an evil, it's just a missed opportunity (and the reality of trying to get good people involved with a standards process).

I think that your better argument is that an open Dart repository from the start could have fed ideas back into TC39 process, but the problems you mention didn't suffer from lack of knowledge about them, just champions for strawman solutions. That is, again, not a job that most relish.

> We did hear a dire warning from one Google rep in May 2010 that if two of these proposals were not promoted to Harmony status, JS "would be replaced!"

"Unnamed sources at Google suggest gmail actually runs on the blood of orphans, kittens." What are you, a Techcrunch guest columnist? Give a name or don't bring it up.

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