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Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

dreamintech.net

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Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#11

Post by dhconnelly »

soc88 wrote: post #4
nathanpc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great language and with the series of hackathons they planned they will spread the language and help improve it. I was on at #dart @ Freenode which is their official IRC channel today and the guys at the hackathon were building a way of using Dart to control an Arduino board. Pretty cool stuff.

Dart is such an uninspiring, imagined-in-1995 language that I still wonder if I ever find a use-case for it. This we-are-from-Google-and-everyone-else-is-stupid approach to language design is imho the real disease (also see the comment on Google Guava, that tells a lot). I just don't want to develop in a language which throws the last 2 decades of language design experience over board because they designed a language…

It would be helpful if you could elaborate some on why you think that Dart:

- has a "we-are-from-Google-and-everyone-else-is-stupid approach" - "throws the last 2 decades of language design experience over board"

because neither of those things seem obvious to me.

Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#12

Post by azakai »

The article is basically marketing fluff.

And the main reason to not use Dart is alluded to in a quote in it,

> Dart compiles to JavaScript, so your Dart web apps will work in multiple browsers (not just ours).

which is misleading, since to that should be added "but they will run much more slowly in IE, Firefox, WebKit and Opera", because none of them will embed the nonstandard Dart VM, only Chrome will.

Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#13

Post by abraxasz »

I actually thought that the article was a joke (no offense). It starts off saying "... how you can become more productive and happier", and then:

- libraries are needed. And then it proceed to describe how if you want to get something done you have to reinvent the wheel, or port it (which amounts to the same insofar as it slows you down)

- Weekly updates (in particular the bit on downloading the new build and trying out the new features). How exactly does having to check for new features (and test them) makes me write better code, faster?

- ".. the code becomes a hell to understand. With the Dart syntax, this is a bit more difficult.." Really? I'm sure this one is a typo. Or I'm missing something.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Dart is not cool, or anything (I haven't tried it). But based on the arguments in the article, I simply don't see how exactly the language is a productivity boost..

Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#15

Post by azakai »

AjJi wrote: post #7
soc88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is such an uninspiring, imagined-in-1995 language that I still wonder if I ever find a use-case for it. This we-are-from-Google-and-everyone-else-is-stupid approach to language design is imho the real disease (also see the comment on Google Guava, that tells a lot). I just don't want to develop in a language which throws the last 2 decades of language design experience over board because they designed a language…

care to elaborate? I'm not a DART developer, but by checking out this: http://synonym.dartlang.org/ it seems to me that the language is doing some great things: Getting rid of "undefined", adding a class+extend, optional params are much better compared to JS, jquery-like DOM querying.

The very first example there says

> // Note: This will only work in Dartium (a build of Chromium with Dart VM)

This isn't a temporary issue. Google might add the Dart VM to Chrome, but the chances of it showing up in any other browsers are close to 0.

Aside from that, yes, Dart improves on some syntax issues like you said. But the compiling-to-JS approach lets you do a lot more, you can write CoffeeScript or C++ or C# or Java and compile those to JS as well.

Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#16

Post by sad_panda »

soc88 wrote: post #4
nathanpc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great language and with the series of hackathons they planned they will spread the language and help improve it. I was on at #dart @ Freenode which is their official IRC channel today and the guys at the hackathon were building a way of using Dart to control an Arduino board. Pretty cool stuff.

Dart is such an uninspiring, imagined-in-1995 language that I still wonder if I ever find a use-case for it. This we-are-from-Google-and-everyone-else-is-stupid approach to language design is imho the real disease (also see the comment on Google Guava, that tells a lot). I just don't want to develop in a language which throws the last 2 decades of language design experience over board because they designed a language…

I like Guava a lot!

Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#18

Post by soc88 »

voxx wrote: post #8
soc88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is such an uninspiring, imagined-in-1995 language that I still wonder if I ever find a use-case for it. This we-are-from-Google-and-everyone-else-is-stupid approach to language design is imho the real disease (also see the comment on Google Guava, that tells a lot). I just don't want to develop in a language which throws the last 2 decades of language design experience over board because they designed a language…

It's great to see the other side of the story, at least. You could tone down your words and maybe present some facts, but I'm sure everyone appreciates your contribution either way.

Thanks. I updated my original comment.

Re: Why You Should Start Dart’ing Right Now

#20

Post by karterk »

eaurouge wrote: post #6

Not particularly impressed with the Dart comparisons to JavaScript on http://synonym.dartlang.org/ . I'd rather use CoffeeScript. Besides I'm not about to embark on yet another experiment, as a guinea pig, with Google.

You're looking only at a part of the whole picture. Dart's vision is to offer a complete framework and hence you should not judge it only based on the language and syntax.
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