When you're trying to change things, it's best to appeal to the early adopters and to do give them a real reason to switch. Making it look the same and appealing to the same "user base" won't work, because then they might find little reason to switch in the first place.

Staying with the norm worked out quite well for both Java and C#.

When I learned Java in 1996 I did not already know Haskel, Lisp and Python. Now I do.

I learned LISP and Python before Java and C#. The latter two are just as useful nevertheless.

The world's experience outside of HN makes me think Dart will not be at all inhibited by its Java like syntax. If it doesn't catch on, it will be for other reasons.

> I was hoping for something more like Python.

Me too! We already have a very readable, simple and elegant language, let's use that. Anyone know why that wouldn't have worked? (Not using the current CPython implementation but maybe the same syntax but with a different (web-only) set of libraries, that is...)

That's almost exactly what coffeescript is.

With Source Mapping in browsers, it also means you'll be able to get a .coffee line in your tracebacks too.

I agree. Yes, I would have liked to just have coffeescript as their new language. Maybe they could have just supported direct native execution on Chrome. Maybe Firefox would have followed.

CoffeeScript solves most of the problems with JavaScript's syntax, but the problem they're trying to solve here isn't the syntax, it's the structure and semantics.

Because Python's semantics are fucktarded.

I interpreted (no pun intended) this all to mean is that Dart is aimed at people who spend all day writing Java.