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Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#41

Post by aboodman »

erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

I don't really like Dart, but I put up with it in order to use Flutter, which is awesome.

Dart is basically ES6&(TypeScript|Flow), but randomly slightly different, and usually in a way that makes it slightly weaker or more Java-eque, neither of which I prefer.

Basically it's not different enough from ES6 (plus a typing system) to be useful, just different enough to be annoying.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#42

Post by aboodman »

aboodman wrote: post #41
erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

I don't really like Dart, but I put up with it in order to use Flutter, which is awesome. Dart is basically ES6&(TypeScript|Flow), but randomly slightly different, and usually in a way that makes it slightly weaker or more Java-eque, neither of which I prefer. Basically it's not different enough from ES6 (plus a typing system) to be useful, just different enough to be annoying.

Also different enough to make none of the libraries in the huge js ecosystem readily accessible.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#43

Post by verttii »

aboodman wrote: post #42
aboodman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really like Dart, but I put up with it in order to use Flutter, which is awesome. Dart is basically ES6&(TypeScript|Flow), but randomly slightly different, and usually in a way that makes it slightly weaker or more Java-eque, neither of which I prefer. Basically it's not different enough from ES6 (plus a typing system) to be useful, just different enough to be annoying.

Also different enough to make none of the libraries in the huge js ecosystem readily accessible.

To be fair they're not always that easily accessible on React Native either. A lot of the times they seem to break stuff in weird ways, if they work at all.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#44

Post by skybrian »

losvedir wrote: post #15

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I'm not sure how I feel about Google's so-called "ambient computing" idea that they were all about at this year's Google I/O, but Flutter being championed for desktop and web are huge! Does this mean the end of Electron, finally? They say it runs on macOS, I hope they get to Windows and Linux soon. I built a little Android/iOS app in Flutter and it was a real delight. I didn't especi…

I don't know how well they're supporting desktop and web UI idioms yet, but it looks like you can try out Flutter on the web using DartPad:

https://medium.com/dartlang/a-brand-new-dartpad-dev-with-flu...

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#45

Post by LocalPCGuy »

erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

I think it is really comparable to TypeScript. I do miss (sometimes) Union operators (I know there are some ways to add that to Dart). And as a JS/TS dev first, some things about Dart drive me a bit bonkers - like their array methods and how some of them return void and some of them return a new array. Like forEach vs. map, but at least those two make sense. Some of the ones in Dart don't feel like they make sense, at least to me.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#46

Post by pjmlp »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason people learn Android Java, and use Android to publish Android apps.

But this is to prevent having to learn Java to publish Android apps.

Android uses a Java dialect, now replaced by Kotlin.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#47

Post by skybrian »

yesimahuman wrote: post #2

Bizarre reading the vision for this "ambient computing" platform given that the web platform has already been doing that for years and you could imagine the Chrome team using nearly identical terms to describe what their mission is.

Apparently a few of the folks working on Flutter used to work on Chrome and started thinking about what they could do if they could start fresh.

There are still a lot of older api's that web browsers have to support.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#48

Post by IshKebab »

yesimahuman wrote: post #2

Bizarre reading the vision for this "ambient computing" platform given that the web platform has already been doing that for years and you could imagine the Chrome team using nearly identical terms to describe what their mission is.

Sure, but the web is never going to be a great platform for apps on mobile or embedded devices.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#49

Post by LocalPCGuy »

soneca wrote: post #5

Not sure if it is counter-intuitive, but I was deciding between React Native and Flutter for a project and this announcement nudged me to decide on React Native. I am pretty sure I just want my app to run on Android, iOS, and web. If Flutter's vision is making it possible to also design to TVs, smartwatches, thermostats, doorbells, fridges, etc it means that there will be trade-offs, added complexity, overhead, desig…

We specifically evaluated both RN and Flutter in a lot of depth. We ended up going with Flutter and could not be happier. I agree with other commenters, it seems like you had your mind made up because this is a very weak reason to use one over the other.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#50

Post by erokar »

ble52 wrote: post #33

Am I the only one who sees all these Electrons, React Natives, Flutters, etc. as mostly middle-management-pleasing technologies made for crunching cookie-cutter apps with the least amount of outsourced developers as possible? Whenever I see Slack, Spotify, VS Code, or any other "universal" app, it always strikes me as a completely out of place it looks and behaves, no matter what OS it's running on. Yes, it's relativ…

I don't think the majority of end users care much. They have gotten used to web apps more than anything, a unified web-like UI across platforms might even been seen as a positive by them.
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