Dart language • Hacker News Board

Re: Dart language

#331

Post by iaskwhy » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 3:54 PM UTC

highwind81 wrote: post #277

iaskwhy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "boring Java-like syntax" mean? Can anyone show some quick examples of a boring and a not boring syntax?

Circle my_circle = new Circle(); I have to type the word circle 3 times to define a circle. It gets boring. This gets worse if you are trying to do any kind of user input. BufferedReader my_reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); Had to type reader 4 times. :(

But is it something people actually type? I haven't played with Java for almost ten years now but I do C# for a living which is pretty similar and I can't remember the last time I had to type something that long, Visual Studio does it for me. I can see the point if you say it's longer to read but it's also much clearer, isn't it?

Re: Dart language

#332

Post by ootachi » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:07 PM UTC

enneff wrote: post #208

sipefree wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go doesn't really have pointers in the same manner as C, though, does it? As was as I was aware, you can only have a pointer to an actual object.

Go allows you to take the address of any value. You just can't do pointer arithmetic like you can in C. That is, you can't address uninitialized memory.

I assume you mean "any lvalue"? You can't take the address of rvalues, can you?

Re: Dart language

#333

Post by ootachi » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:09 PM UTC

leoc wrote: post #329

cromwellian wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers already have a wide performance differential. What's the ratio between V8 and IE6? Or between desktop and mobile? As long as the performance isn't pathologically bad, it won't matter. Dart apps will start up quicker and run a percentage faster. Maybe perform much better on mobile. A decent win, but doesn't really change the fragmentation equation much from what it already is. The keyword Brendan used was "de…

And in any case I seem to recall being assured by Mozilla that we don't need no Native Client because Javascript is going to be fast enough for everything . Even pre-existing non-JS code could just be compiled to mighty JavaScript, the Assembler of The Web™ and all would be well. But now Dart is unacceptable because Dart-to-JS won't be close enough to the performance of native Dart?

I don't think any browser manufacturer would have an issue with Dart if it were only a Dart-to-JS compiler. Nobody had issues with GWT or CoffeeScript, after all.

Re: Dart language

#334

Post by wbhart » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:11 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #297

wbhart wrote: post #268

Hmm. print('${(1 print('${(1 print('${(1 print('${(1 (I've used x instead of star here as the latter does not display on HN.) This is completely nonsensical.

It has the same numeric semantics as Javascript. Javascript does not have a 64-bit integer.

This is not about the lack of 64 bit integers. Dart can have 32 bit or 31 bit or 30 bit integers or whatever it wants.

But mathematically it doesn't make sense to have an int type which does not represent integers consistently. Clearly Javascript can represent 2^31 as a positive integer. In fact it can represent 2^53 as a positive integer (of course in reality it uses a double precision float) as can be verified by typing (1So why is (1In fact, not having at least 32 bit unsigned integers would be a major drawback. For efficiency reasons you want these to be handled directly by your VM using integer assembly instructions. This is the only way that you'll ever implement efficient bignum libraries for example which require FFT's which necessarily use integers that are an exact multiple of 32 bits in length (Z/pZ for p = 2^(2^L) + 1 usually, where 2^L is a multiple of 64 at least, usually).

Re: Dart language

#335

Post by WayneDB » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:12 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #307

dextorious wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Microsoft hired Anders Hejlsberg for .Net which I don't think was a good idea, he is a great engineer but not a PL theory expert." Wow. And I thought nobody in their right minds would question Hejlsberg's chops or the work he did for .Net. He is "not a PL theory expert"? Great. We need less of them in mainstream language design and more pragmatism.

> And I thought nobody in their right minds would question Hejlsberg's chops or the work he did for .Net. Why not? C# 1.0 was terrible and most of the version since have been exercises in trying to fix it by piling more stuff on, in order to replace previous tentative fixes which did not work for any value of "work" worth using because they lacked generality. > We need less of them in mainstream language design and m…

C# 1.0 was "terrible" for the reasons of being practical. You can design the most beautiful language in the world, but if all of the features you designed into it add exponential degrees of complexity to the rest of the system (parser, compiler, runtime, base framework, etc) then you're never going to release.

What language do you think was perfect at it's first release?

Re: Dart language

#336

Post by WayneDB » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:20 PM UTC

thristian wrote: post #232

georgemcbay wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the context and still disagree. If Dart is so much better than JavaScript on Chrome and if its Dart->JS engine does a good enough job of creating usable JS on other browsers that developers are willing to commit to using it to write apps then, well, that's too bad for everyone else, isn't it? Why should Google put the brakes on improving client side development just because it puts other browsers in the…

When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages…

"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 luck for you. Go build your own browser and language and drum up your own support for it. All of this political correctness is a bunch of bull.

Re: Dart language

#337

Post by petercooper » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:21 PM UTC

I know many HN readers subscribe to my JavaScript, Ruby, and HTML5 newsletters so a public service announcement.. http://dartweekly.com/ is up and will be publishing soon :-)

Re: Dart language

#338

Post by chintan » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:24 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #293

I don't speak for the team but I believe I can add some perspective. Think of it this way: what is GWT? GWT os compiling Java, a statically typed language, into Javascript. If you've used GWT you'll know that particularly early on there was a lot of friction. What's simple in Javascript with anonymous objects and duck typing doesn't quite gel with Java so you've had to do things like use JSNI for edge cases. Google h…

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.

Re: Dart language

#339

Post by bad_user » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

zohebv wrote: post #65

From whatever little I see, I am already hating it :-) This looks like Java for Javascript, if that makes any kind of sense. We are in the year 2011, PL design has progressed so much since 1990 that such an anachronism is unpardonable. I sincerely wish that companies like Google focus on hiring the right kind of person for designing programming languages. What is frustrating is that there are so many people who can d…

On Anders - you're not giving him enough credit.

C# had a hard constraint to start with - it was supposed to be an easy replacement for Java, it actually started from Microsoft's own Java implementation and it had to ship as fast as possible.

Even so, the language evolved nicely as they left room for improvement in a forward-thinking manner.

Also, C# 1.1 did have 5 things which I terribly miss from Java - delegates, P/Invoke, stack-allocated types without "special" exceptions, object properties and the GAC. From a theory-standpoint, none of them are groundbreaking, but we are talking about a language that's supposed to be grounded in real-world constraints.

Re: Dart language

#340

Post by seasoup » Mon, Oct 10, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

The only problem I have with this sort of development effort is that it fails to recognize that Javascript is an awesome language unto itself and has no need of "fixing" by introducing a completely new language that is completely different.

Sure, it needs a few refinements here and there, but by and large Javascript is an incredible, flexible, and battle tested language. As a web developer with 11 years of experience, who has worked professionally with RoR, Java, PHP, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, my feedback is just stop.

The world doesn't need another tool that obviates the need for engineers to learn Javascript to program on the web. Seriously, Javascript isn't that difficult. Just learn it, buckle down and spend a couple months writing Javascript and you'll be just fine.

If half the time spent writing Dart had been spent learning Javascript instead, then you would think in prototypes instead of classes, anonymous functions instead of one off objects, callbacks instead of um... not having callbacks, and dynamic variables instead of casting, casting, casting.

I'm not claiming Javascript is better then your language of choice, I'm just saying that as a language, it's awesome. It's not broke, and as a web developer I'm not looking for something to replace it.