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I’m pretty sure the Google name association can explain the languages popularity. I remember reading novices wanting to learn Golang due to the Google name attachment. That propelled the language into many minds, especially new programmers.
Then why is Dart much less successful?
It doesn't stand in people's way.
I realize having a language with a gentle learning curve that ends at a very low level has its benefits if you want to commoditize software development, and lots of people want just that, but for me it does kill much of the fun. It doesn't seem very suitable for large-ish projects either, at least I haven't seen one that wasn't a mess yet.
- Backed by Google
- Plan 9 and UNIX people as designers
- Docker migrated from Python to Go
- Kubernetes migrated from Java to Go
- After Docker and Kubernetes explosion, all Cloud Native Foundation projects start using the same language, thus adoption
I’m pretty sure the Google name association can explain the languages popularity. I remember reading novices wanting to learn Golang due to the Google name attachment. That propelled the language into many minds, especially new programmers.
Then why is Dart much less successful?
Easy, - Backed by Google - Plan 9 and UNIX people as designers - Docker migrated from Python to Go - Kubernetes migrated from Java to Go - After Docker and Kubernetes explosion, all Cloud Native Foundation projects start using the same language, thus adoption
The CTO dictated our move to Go two years ago on what felt like a combination of whimsy and anti-Microsoft sentiment. I'll admit that there are parts of the language that are nice, such as the relatively snappy compile times and single statically linked binary output, but not a single day goes by where I don't miss C#, and more specifically .NET Core (now just .NET I guess?), which can do everything Go is doing.
Like Go, C# has also always been a decade behind on the tooling side. For a recent project I wanted very fast HTML templating and I/O. Went with C# instead of Go and it's looking pretty good so far. The tooling is close to the level Ruby was ten years ago, and that was really acceptable. I was very happy with my previous project that I did in Go as well, you just can't go wrong with Go for implementing network protoc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that were enough Angular would be more popular than it is.
Angular is not a language but a framework. A more reasonable comparison would be Dart. Besides, being backed by a $CORP is necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for a language to become mainstream.
(I chose Golang for the best async scheduler and the very fast compile times).
What I'm more interested in is the comparison between the cases of Go and Dart, which both are languages developed by Google. Why Go is so much more successful (in the system programming domain) than Dart (in the web/mobile/desktop domains)? Many of the listed good choices (e.g. being developer-focused) can be (had been?) applied to Dart as well.
Also, I did a thought experiment a couple of years ago on how Flutter would look like if it was built on top of Go [1] (it doesn't capture all the surface of Flutter, but that was my level of involvement with Flutter by that time).
Anyway, thanks for reminding about idea of writing blog post on those two.
What I'm more interested in is the comparison between the cases of Go and Dart, which both are languages developed by Google. Why Go is so much more successful (in the system programming domain) than Dart (in the web/mobile/desktop domains)? Many of the listed good choices (e.g. being developer-focused) can be (had been?) applied to Dart as well.
First Chrome was placing it as JavaScript replacement, which made its adoption a failure from other browser vendors, similar to what happened with PNaCL.
After the project's dimissal, it got rescued by AdWords team that had just migrated away from GWT into Dart, and surely wasn't willing to drop it on the floor.
Then Flutter kind of gave it a new purpose, and by then most of the original designers had left as they were against the new direction of strong typing, and I guess how everything was managed to start with.
They have found a place in Fuschia, yet the Android team is also quite keen in making ART run on top of Fuchsia, and it is no surprise the Jetpack Compose is Flutter in Kotlin.