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Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

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Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#11

Post by tyleregeto »

michaelwww wrote: post #5
pnt wrote: post #4

I feel like Dart's emphasis on a fast but chrome-only vm has hindered it's adoption. I understand their goal, unlike most compile-to-js languages, was a language more amenable to fast implementation. However, I think the initial community reaction would have been more positive if Dart was positioned first as a language that compiled to js, with the added benefit that it runs significantly faster on Chrome.

I agree. They stumbled initially because the "hello world" JavaScript output was something huge (17,000 LOC if I remember correctly.) But I think they are recovering nicely and people will notice.

That was unfortunate, mostly because a single compiler flag brought the code base way down, smaller the JQuery. If I recall correctly, that mistake was from a blogger, not Google, but it caught the bad publicity winds. Somebody was more eager to tear it apart than learn the tools.

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#12

Post by mtgx »

pnt wrote: post #4

I feel like Dart's emphasis on a fast but chrome-only vm has hindered it's adoption. I understand their goal, unlike most compile-to-js languages, was a language more amenable to fast implementation. However, I think the initial community reaction would have been more positive if Dart was positioned first as a language that compiled to js, with the added benefit that it runs significantly faster on Chrome.

Anything really new would be like that. WebGL was also Firefox-only for a while, until Chrome decided to adopt it. To make them a standard across browsers you either need to make them very popular, and make the others have no choice but adopting it, or collaborating. But the last one seems to happen less and less lately, with all companies.

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#14

Post by dragonwriter »

pnt wrote: post #7
dragonwriter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like Dart's emphasis on a fast but chrome-only vm has hindered it's adoption. Dart's VM isn't Chrome-only, its open source, and available both standalone and bundled into Chromium. > However, I think the initial community reaction would have been more positive if Dart was positioned first as a language that compiled to js, with the added benefit that it runs significantly faster on Chrome. Reaction might hav…

> Dart's VM isn't Chrome-only I meant that dart is chrome-only in practice. I don't know of any other browser vendor that bundles the dart vm, including the few browsers based on chromium like rockmelt or 360. > However, I think that even if initial reaction might have been better with such a response, Google clearly did the right thing by being up front about their vision. I can appreciate Google's directness regard…

> I meant that dart is chrome-only in practice. I don't know of any other browser vendor that bundles the dart vm, including the few browsers based on chromium like rockmelt or 360.

I didn't think even Chrome bundles Dart, yet, either; for native Dart (as opposed to compiled-to-JS Dart), Google distributes (both separately and with the Dart SDK) a special Chromium-based browser with the Dart VM integrated called "Dartium".

For all practical short-term purposes, Dart is another compiled-to-JavaScript language, and is no more plagued by multiple backends than JavaScript (which, after all, runs on multiple different engines from different vendors) is.

And I don't see how having an optimized VM in development makes it less attractive than compiled-to-JS languages that don't have that.

> However, from a web developer's perspective, Dart's multiple backends is very unappealing. I hesitate to adopt even a language like clojurescript or coffeescript because of debugging barriers and potential bugs in the language's crevices (though these problems are diminishing with things like source map support).

I would think the fact that Dart is -- rather overtly -- immature and rapidly changing would be a much bigger barrier to adoption by relatively conservative, need-something-that-works-now, web developers. I don't see how having an experimental optimized VM available-but-not-widely-available-to-end-users factors in to making it less attractive to web developers.

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#15

Post by phase_9 »

seanalltogether wrote: post #10

Can anyone explain what the difference between TypeScript and ECMAScript 4 are? I know ECMAScript 4 was abandoned for some reason, but from the few examples I've seen of Typescript it looks very similar. Did the js community just need a few more years to come around to the ideas?

ECMAScript 4 was implemented in ActionScript 3[1]; a very nice language to work with IMHO. The members of the ECMAScript steering group launched into a public fracas on their respective blogs[2] which eventually ended in the draft being canned, despite the fact both ActionScript and Silverlight were already based on the standard... shame.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript#ActionScript_3.0

[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2007/10/30/ecmascript-3-a...

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#17

Post by camus »

seanalltogether wrote: post #10

Can anyone explain what the difference between TypeScript and ECMAScript 4 are? I know ECMAScript 4 was abandoned for some reason, but from the few examples I've seen of Typescript it looks very similar. Did the js community just need a few more years to come around to the ideas?

ES4 ~= Action Script (with packages , classes , interfaces ,etc...)

The problem with typescript is that there is no real built-in module support you either need AMD or CommonJS that's why i wont use it.

The language is great but i dont want to have to use requireJS to create reusable components.

Funny how Microsoft rejected ES4 and now is "praising" and "advocating" for better web scripting language. That's hypocrisy.

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#18

Post by chr1 »

seanalltogether wrote: post #10

Can anyone explain what the difference between TypeScript and ECMAScript 4 are? I know ECMAScript 4 was abandoned for some reason, but from the few examples I've seen of Typescript it looks very similar. Did the js community just need a few more years to come around to the ideas?

Probably you've seen examples of ES6 which is actively developed now, and many features from it are already available in firefox nightlies. ES4 was abandoned 3-4 years ago. It was partially implemented in firefox, and ff addons used it. One of it's features that didn't made into ES6 was inline xml inside javascript. It was recently removed from firefox.

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#19

Post by camus »

phase_9 wrote: post #15
seanalltogether wrote: post #10

Can anyone explain what the difference between TypeScript and ECMAScript 4 are? I know ECMAScript 4 was abandoned for some reason, but from the few examples I've seen of Typescript it looks very similar. Did the js community just need a few more years to come around to the ideas?

ECMAScript 4 was implemented in ActionScript 3[1]; a very nice language to work with IMHO. The members of the ECMAScript steering group launched into a public fracas on their respective blogs[2] which eventually ended in the draft being canned, despite the fact both ActionScript and Silverlight were already based on the standard... shame. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript#ActionScript_3.0 [2] http://blogs…

    >    The second system syndrome is that evil effect that often happens when redesign a small, working system so that it becomes a huge leviathan built by piling new features over new features.

    >    Today I was reading the overview of ECMASCript 4 from ecmascript.org, and I got this very bad feeling that maybe the fourth version of ES, is suffering of an extremely strong case of this problem.
I dont know who is that guy , but what a load of cr*p ... it's people like him that got us stuck with what is javascript today. People often complain that Flash prevented Javascript from being widely adopted , the truth is that Macromedia/Adobe tried to push a better Javascript that would have helped the language then and today.

Imagine we had ES4 and HTML5 today. Nobody would be complaining about how much javascript sucks , and there would be no need for typescript, coffeescript ,etc ...

Re: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

#20

Post by sultezdukes »

It's a pretty smart move that Microsoft did with TypeScript, making it a proper superset of JavaScript. Google seems to be stuck in the past, bringing out its own VM that is a complete non-starter, and making another class-based, Java-like language. I guess Google is going down the road that Microsoft did years ago with flinging feces on the wall and see what sticks.

I have nothing against Dart. I played with it a year and a half ago when the Eclipse beta came out. It's nice tooling, but brings absolutely nothing interesting to the table.

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