I've always felt this to be a net negative, and it puts me off Flutter more than anything else.
I know it has no bearing on the app developer or the end user, but there's something about pouring thousands of person-hours into making a facsimile of something that already exists (especially something that has already had thousands of person-hours put into usability and accessibility) that feels so wasteful. It's silly I know, but it just doesn't sit right with me.
The sky project that became flutter was demoed at the April 2015 dart conf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIWl33YMwA
As regards Javascript, that's what they started with, they looked at other languages and gave dart a go, it gave them faster startup and the dart team offered them stateful hot reload.
Anyway working in the chrome space, they prob didn't know that Kotlin existed pre 2015 and prob would have gone with Python if could.
It's a unified solution that gives developers more freedom of choice, with some versions of it already battle tested in large production apps. If you're up for it, I would love to be able to email you when we release the public version or maybe even earlier.
React Native, NativeScript, Xamarin
Right now, there's only one single-codebase solution to render to android, ios, mac, linux, windows and the web - and that is Flutter.
But Flutter choosing Dart is more of an "easier to control the roadmap" strategy than the bs they actually put up on their FAQ
I'd really like a Flutter like framework (that renders to it's own widgets) but with kotlin as the framework language and it isn't impossible to make. I don't see Google making it, as it conflicts with Flutter.
Would like to see a developer oriented company like Jetpack and the open source community, make a push for a truly Flutter alternative.