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I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

blog.sethladd.com

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Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#61

Post by magicalist »

pessimizer wrote: post #50
rdtsc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I heard it from your post is a lot vitriol and hatred. I don't know who Seth Ladd is. I looked at the page and it skipped over his title and went straight to the text. I don't care if Google paid him, or if the works for Google, or if he wrote because he was forced to at gunpoint by Colombian mafia. It doesn't matter. It is a good article and I enjoyed reading it. It is very well done, it shows how the IDE works,…

>proof that he was forced to do this against his will by Google strawman alert.

That's not a strawman. It would be a strawman if the GP characterized the original comment as suggesting that, but it's not. It's saying that even this facetiously extreme example still would not disqualify the content of the post from being useful/interesting/whatever.

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#62

Post by hamax »

pessimizer wrote: post #50
rdtsc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I heard it from your post is a lot vitriol and hatred. I don't know who Seth Ladd is. I looked at the page and it skipped over his title and went straight to the text. I don't care if Google paid him, or if the works for Google, or if he wrote because he was forced to at gunpoint by Colombian mafia. It doesn't matter. It is a good article and I enjoyed reading it. It is very well done, it shows how the IDE works,…

>proof that he was forced to do this against his will by Google strawman alert.

Saying X isn't worth discussing but something worse than X maybe would be isn't a strawman.

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#64

Post by spankalee »

plorkyeran wrote: post #18
spankalee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of astroturfing doesn't seem to match mine. Seth states several times on his blog that he works on Dart developer relations at Google. Blogging about Dart is part of his job, and in no way is he being deceiving about that fact. I on the other hand am simply an engineer on the Dart team, as I must disclaim in this context.

Where does he mention that other than the sidebar? I completely missed the fact that he works for Google while reading the article since it's never mentioned in the body of the article itself, and the article is written as if he's completely new to Dart and trying it out for fun. If he's not trying to present that image, then it's a really awful writing style.

The very top of the page:

Seth Ladd's Blog

Dart DevRel @ Google, web engineer, author, conference organizer.

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#65

Post by magicalist »

plorkyeran wrote: post #38
vdaniuk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you imply a conflict of interest? If you do, please state it explicitly. Your criticism as it stands doesn't add to the discussion and one could say that your writing style is really awful, too. Sidebar is not an unusual place to place author bio and it is definitely enough for me.

Okay, I'll state it explicitly: I feel that the article is actively deceptive about the background of the author, which makes me distrust the content of the article as well. The sidebar with his background is not visible on the first page of the content, so I would have had to interrupt reading the article to read it. I say that it is a bad writing style because I am assuming good faith. I assume that the positioning…

> I assume that the positioning of his bio is merely unfortunate and not specifically chosen to reduce the number of people who read it, and that the article is not actually trying to deceive me about the author

Oh please. Most blog authors barely manage to fill out an About page, let alone a sidebar and a big subheading at the top of the page that says who their employer is. If you're going to claim to be "assuming good faith", how about actually doing so?

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#66

Post by Touche »

sethladd wrote: post #59
Touche wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What irks me is that the things he picks on have long since been solved. So the fact that he works at Google tells me that he knows better and is being intentionally deceitful. He picked a project that doesn't use any modern (by modern I mean in the last 5 years) practices like module loaders. It's fine to say that JavaScript doesn't have this by default, but that's not what he did here. He pretended to think that it…

I hope I didn't "pick on" anything. My attempt was to do a before/after and then list out what I, personally, learned. I thought I did say "JavaScript doesn't have some of these features like modules or promises by default" at the bottom of the article. I picked a project that was written this year, and because it used Web Audio API and looked pretty. I was inspired by the original app, and I wanted to see what a Dar…

The problem is that you picked a project that doesn't reflect current (again, defining current as in the past 5 years at least) development practices. Any decent JS project these days is using a modular loader and has a bower.json that has a 'main' property telling you the entry point.

I'm sure someone could look at early Dart projects and find things unpleasant about them compared to today.

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#67

Post by bronbron »

todd8 wrote: post #2

I really like Dart. I'm surprised its not getting traction faster. Its a language with few surprises, everything looks familiar and works as you'd expect without gotcha's. While it doesn't feel cutting edge like Haskell or retro on steroids like Clojure, it seems just right as a replacement for Javascript.

> I'm surprised its not getting traction faster.

There are so many novel, cool "JS replacements" that it's easy to feel some paralysis about the whole matter. Do you go with Dart? TypeScript? Clojure? Or do you stick with regular JS and start learning a new framework (e.g. Angular)?

They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I think a good majority of web developers are waiting to see what unfolds before committing one way or the other.

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#68

Post by Nemcue »

sethladd wrote: post #21
bla2 wrote: post #6

I wonder how the size of the dart-generated js compares to the size of the original js.

Good question, I'll try to add that. Maybe more importantly, what is the startup time for the two versions?

Would also be interesting: Perform some operations, compare flame charts from Chrome developer tools.

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#69

Post by jamesknelson »

sethladd wrote: post #33
Excavator wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought you'd might want to know that Promise¹ is available in Firefox & Chrome since quite a while back and the spec for Modules can be found here: Spec: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules 1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Yup, thanks! What's the story for modern browsers that don't yet support those features? Do they both have polyfills? As I mentioned in the article, libraries and futures aren't exclusive to Dart. It's just that they are here now for Dart and are compiled to JavaScript for all modern browsers. I think it's telling that the original author didn't use Promises or Modules. Of course he could have, but we should ask, why…

While a lot of browsers are still lacking pretty much any ES6 support, you can get around this by using Traceur [1] to compile your ES6 javascript down to ES5, and then using the es6-shim [2] for new ES6 libraries (Promise, etc.)

Given that you'll need to compile dart down to JS for it to run on any browser (including chrome), and given that it seems unlikely Mozilla will ever include a dart VM, I'd say that starting to learn ES6 now is probably a better long-term bet than learning dart. Which isn't to say Dart isn't a nice language...

[1] https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler

[2] https://github.com/paulmillr/es6-shim

Re: I ported a JavaScript app to Dart

#70

Post by pekk »

supporting wrote: post #12

It's a little bit sad that Google pays people to have their entire job be to astroturf for Dart with blog posts like this one. Being a "developer advocate" is one thing, writing official documentation, answering questions on forums, whatever — but "I ported a JavaScript app to Dart. Here's what I learned." Seriously? More like "I'm on the Dart Team. I ported a JavaScript app to Dart because it's my job." Open source…

"I replaced all my Python code with Go. Here's what I learned." Several times a week. Why is that OK and this is not?
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