We get this a lot. To the point that my colleague wrote this: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf

It's not easy to explain in a HN comment. Technical decisions like these never are. In this particular case, there is no single "Dart can do X and nothing else can". That's not true for any feature. It's the combination that mattered.

All in all, Dart was a really, really, really good choice. Not from a marketing perspective, obviously, but that's not everything.

So, the argument basically boils down to: It's a bad thing to use a dsl or similar only for gui. It's a good thing to use a whole new language you have to port all your code to and that has only a small ecosystem so you can also write all these libraries yourself.

Don't get me wrong. Flutter may well be a formidable piece of software. Dart either. I just don't get how flutter is marketed around the fact that dart was there first with no convincing use case and that people only then started looking for a raison d'etre.

Hey I've been following Dartlang's up and downs over the years, here are some ramblings about Flutter.

When the chrome guys started the Sky experiment, now the flutter project, they started with javascript. I don't know why they dropped javascript, but they looked at several languages before trying Dart. Here is a floss weekly episode with one of the co-founders, talks about flutter's hotreload, an idea that came from the Dart team.

https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s

If swift was opensource back then they may have gone with it and if they started today they may have gone with kotlin native.

Flutter's hotreload feature, something that they didn't know they wanted, was created after they decided to give Dart a go. While the Dart team had missed the boat on getting the Dart VM into chrome, they still had their internal customers using Dart2JS. The Dart team also had their own experiments in IOT and running on IOS.

Maybe Sky/Flutter guys saw Dart solving their problems that Javascript couldn't and they also saw that the Dart team has the expertise to help them in advancing their experiment to where it is today.

Thanks for the background info. I was wrong then.

Hi there, Dart is a really versatile language for our needs: it's what powers stateful Hot Reload, for instance, because it has a powerful VM and JIT compiler that work really well for debug purposes, but also compiles natively to ARM code that runs on both iOS and Android. That combination is pretty compelling, and also hard to find in other languages. Dart also compiles to JavaScript, so you can use the same business logic for your web apps.

Honestly, the language itself is easy to learn if you come from a managed code background -- as ever, it's the domain knowledge that takes time to build (e.g. the libraries and framework of components and classes that any complex application takes advantage of).

Dart 2.0 is not Dart 1.0. And the Flutter team has had a large hand in shaping and forming Dart to its current state (and continues to drive certain priorities for it).

Dart is easy to learn (espeically if you come from a JavaScript, Java, or C# background). It can be compiled in ways suitable for distribution in both Apple and Play Stores. And the Flutter team has direct access to the language team behind Dart to ensure that it works well for mobile development.

Across several industries and in different companies, my experience was that learning Dart was measured in hours and not weeks. One company started to train their HR employees to code in Dart (being their first programming language that they learn) in order to streamline the interviewing process of developers.

If you have seen C#, Kotlin, TypeScript or Java code and understand it, you will understand Dart and will be able to use the language soon enough.

The difference is the amount of available C#, Kotlin, TypeScript or Java jobs and Dart ones.

About two and half years ago I've been using Dart as an interview language for several companies (even though their stack did not include it). Except for one python shop (who were really looking for a hard-core python dev), everyone else was happy with my solutions presented in Dart, because ultimately: (1) the skill in one language is transferable to another one, (2) the job is rarely about a specific technology, rather about seeking a solution.

It usually starts with a small, new thing to adopt a new tech (e.g. a not-yet-important mobile app, or a medium-sized single-page web app), and eventually it can take over other parts of the stack. How fast it happens is really unpredictable.

I agree that Flutter would have been better off using a popular language like Swift or Kotlin.

However, it really isn't a difficult language to pick up. I ported a Java app to Flutter and it was mostly just a case of copying the class files and fixing the syntax errors.

Even if the design choice made sense for [reasons], this is imo the biggest thing holding it back.

Having to learn a new programming language is hardly a rare experience in mobile development.

But when else are you ever going to use dart?

You can say the same thing about Objective-C. Without Kotlin Native, there hasn't been any non-Android use cases for the language yet. Even Swift's web and ML applications haven't gotten huge traction either.