What’s wrong with Dart? (Don’t know anything about the language, just curious.)

Nothing much.

Perhaps a question of expectations: "The big question is whether Google originally intended Dart to replace JavaScript".

https://insights.dice.com/2019/03/27/fall-rise-dart-google-j...

You mean a change in direction?

Dart 1.0 Optional Types runtime checks

Dart 2.0 Mandatory Types (sound null-safe type system) static checks + runtime checks.

Gilad had nothing to do with Dart 2.0, in fact it goes very much against his beliefs in language design.

All the key designer from Dart 1.0 left Google shortly after Chrome dropped support.

The language only got rescue thanks to AdWords not wanting to rewrite their stack yet again (they had recently migrated away from GWT).

Afterwards Flutter provided the necessary funding to keep improving the language as they replaced JavaScript with Dart.

I haven't kept up with Dart, as I kinda fail to see the point right now, so can you elaborate a bit on how you think the current design is going against Gilad Bracha's convictions?

Language evolution is an interesting thing, especially when you've got corporate influence, second system effect etc. Or simply the need to add stuff, as languages are considered just another product, and otherwise you're considered "stale" in today's market. Weird.

Gilad is strongly into dynamic type systems and pluggable types (Dart 1.0, Typescript and so on).

http://bracha.org/Site/Papers.html

Quite. But is that what virtualwhys meant?

so far ~socially Dart has failed but the language is actually way more interesting than I thought it would ...

Interesting. I’m a fan of Gilads work, and have a strong admiration for Lars Bak who were both involved in 1.0. I followed it cursorily from time to time and thought it looked intriguing. I had a number of colleagues from the Smalltalk industry that went to work on it.

They’ve all left now (I don’t know what Lars’ involvement is anymore?).

But I was curious about Dart for a cross platform app and learned Dart 2.0 and was wholeheartedly let down. I just felt like I was staring at a Java dialect. The “sanctioned” tutorial I watched introduced classes as a “way of organizing code” which I guess could abstractly be said to be true, but IMO misses the mark entirely.

Anyway, I found Dart 2.0 to be very uninteresting. Very safe and traditional and boring. Maybe I need to relook closer to try and see what you’re seeing that I did not.

don't read too much into what I said, I barely read the async/concurrent primitives they made, it felt different and interesting. I came with the impression that it would be a cuter java (like you somehow) but these bits caught my brain by surprise.

> … but IMO misses the mark entirely.

because…?

for example…?

Just curious why it failed...

Until recently[0] Dart had pervasive nullability, that is, all types `T` are implicity `Option(T)`. Which in my view was completely unacceptable even in 2011 when it was initially released.

[0]: https://dart.dev/null-safety

So like Java then?

No idea, and I wasn't judging, it's just that on average you'll see 12 languages on articles / news / threads before you see mention of Dart. I heard flutter was solid and quite used but "socially" the mentions are rare.

Because depending on what you want to do, Typescript and Kotlin are better languages with superior tooling, adoption, and community support.