You wrote "influenced a lot of JavaScript standards people." Please name two.

You wrote "The same is actually happening to the unique features of Dart such as typing and SIMD and better modules." My reply: no, yes (thanks to bottom-up work by John McCutchan, not "Dart people" plural -- there you go again), and nope. Any types for ES7/2016 or beyond are likely to be based on TypeScript, Flow, and V8's SoundScript experiment, not on Dart. Modules in ES6 have no relation to Dart modules/packages.

Really, "exaggeration" doesn't being to capture the false overreach of your first comment, and walking back from it to vague "everything's influencing JS" isn't helping.

Apart from SIMD, Google by investing in Dart at cost to JS (recreated V8 team; replace-not-embrace strategy for ~5 years) missed out on uplifting ES6 to have bignums and other things that would materially aid correctness and performance of dart2js, which is now the only way forward for Dart in browsers.

I hate playing Cassandra, but the good news is that Troy didn't fall: JS prevailed, at some unnecessary cost, and as predicted. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949 et seq.

Weird, I really didn't expect this conversation...

(1) I am referring to the high level features of Dart and CoffeeScript, not the specific implementation of features. Specifically I am referring to the clear reduction in CoffeeScript/Dart positive differentiators over the past few years, mostly because future JavaScript (es6/es7) is moving aggressively to close the gap and then go beyond Dart/CoffeeScript. This is a great thing.

(2) I am a complete outsider to the standardization process - I actually know no one involved in the process. So why did I make the inference then so confidently? I've been doing software product development in competitive industries for a couple decades now. I know how it works. People are always influenced by competitors to push ahead faster and smarter, especially competitors that try to jump ahead.

This comment of mine from two years ago sums up my feelings of Dart and its influence on JavaScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728786

I think what Brendan is trying to say is that Dart simply had no influence on ES6 and ES7 except for the idea of SIMD. That means no specific implementations, and no high level ideas.

Any resemblance you might find between Dart and ES6/ES7 would be because of Darts resemblance to either CoffeeScript or TypeScript, languages that did in fact influence ES6 and ES7.

My personal view: I don't think Dart is the sort of language Javascript wants to be like at all. Also, totally off topic regarding your comment of 2 years ago: Java has never kept up with C# has always been years behind and still lacks many features that C# has had for ages. The only reason people still use Java is that C# had no enterprise backing on non-Microsoft platforms and its main implementation was proprietary. These things are changing, and I think that will be the end (finally) of Java.

"These things are changing,"

There is still no end to end story for dev on Linux/Mac with MS backed tools (Mono is not .NET).

"and I think that will be the end (finally) of Java."

just day after Google will take C# as main dev lang for Android...

IMHO It's more likely that Dart will become new Android's main lang.

Actually, MS recently open-sourced the .NET framework (".NET Core") and announced they will be adding support for Linux and Mac OS X: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx

...seriously. April the first is still 5 days away.

"Actually, MS recently open-sourced the .NET framework (".NET Core")"

I know that. My point is you go to dartlang.org and get the IDE with SDK with single download for Mac, Linux or Windows and use it now.

With .NET you can't do the same now on non-Windows (you can use Mono but it's not MS project) Dart is designed to do webdev and .NET isn't

A last note, I didn't intend my comment to be interpreted in the hard fashion that you are interpreting it -- how could I given my outsider status?

I apologize for it being open to that interpretation. I do view most of your criticisms to be based on this unintentional straw man interpretation of my points: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I did not make any straw-man arguments. You wrote specific words (I've quoted them) that denote things that I know to be false. You now seem to admit this. Are we done yet?

> You wrote specific words (I've quoted them) that denote things that I know to be false.

You admitted both the influence on you of CoffeeScript (e.g. fat arrow) and also that the Dart SIMD standard guy did the ES7 SIMD standard. Thus at minimum both CoffeeScript and Dart have influenced directly what has ended up in future versions of JavaScript via the JavaScript standards people. So that original claim of mine is true at minimum, only the qualification of the influence being significant/large is at question.

Near equivalent features to those of Dart and CoffeeScript are rapidly being added to future JavaScript, including fat arrow, typing, classes, SIMD, Futures, async/await, etc. Whether or not these features are directly based on Dart or not doesn't change the fact that it is happening. So that original claim of mine is also true.

E.g.: https://robots.thoughtbot.com/replace-coffeescript-with-es6

The intensity of this argument about an admittedly overly vague hacker news comment is surreal.

While I respect your work highly, benefit from it significantly, and it wasn't my intention to diminish your contributions or effort or anything else, I can not continue this.

Your original claims, plural, included "typing" which cited ES7 TypedObjects (yet TypedObjects are not "typing" as you used the term: a type system, whether optional or tool-checked), and modules. Both of those assertions are flat wrong.

Again, modules in ES6 started before Dart ("Dash") leaked.

Your original comment said "Thank you Dart for showing us the way." Happy-clappy nonsense!

Why am I on the warpath?

First, sloppy history retelling -- even if just fannish exaggeration -- is bad in itself.

Second, and I've gone on the record about this since 2011, Google chose the wrong "REPLACE JS BECAUSE IT CANNOT BE FIXED" strategy, and wasted years and megabucks. Their choice, but not something to congratulate them over. We could have had even more in ES6 if the V8 team had not been reset and JS back-benched as it was. That cost years.

Third, the meme you're spreading is that JS is incompetent or severely hobbled without being shown the way by enlightened others. This does a disservice to many people including the V8 team (the new team) members working in earnest on JS via implementations and TC39. It's a particular falsehood to which I object as a peer of those people on TC39.

Dart as an intentionally designed, full-time-job-for-60+-people, good and well-done project at Google, creating useful and coherent tools as well as the language itself? A fine thing in isolation, ignoring the actual history, global strategy, and consequent trade-offs.

Dart as the thing that showed JS the way (same for CoffeeScript, but let's defer that and focus on Dart)? A fraudulent claim that covers up real mistakes in strategy made by Google, which cost big time and money, not just for JS and the Web, but bad also (in light of this week's news) for Dart.

Why was the strategy bad for Dart? One example: only now, finally, might bignums get into ES7/2016. They could have been in ES6 and in V8 and other engines by now, since we were working on them since 2010, but without a champion who saw the priority and paid someone to spec and implement them in V8.

Do you see my point? Please do not play games about me "admitting" SIMD and maybe one other something else came from Dart. I've written that many times in multiple threads without prodding, on HN and on twitter. This is not an ego match. It's about accurate attribution of history, work, influence, and causality.

What you are letting a hacker news comment thread determine the history of JavaScript? This isn't how history is written - HN posts are emphera for the most part. Last time I checked you were not exactly powerless and reliant on others to write history for you. You have a megaphone, why not use it and write something authoritative on the history of JavaScript and Dart.

Also, you do realize that I wrote this to a Dart audience to encourage them to return to JavaScript -- and you do not convince anyone to change their minds by being an asshole towards their work.

It's HN, I'm here same as you, to opine and argue. Why are you applying a double standard? :-P

Note that what Brendan Eich is saying is that the influence couldn't have happened that way because the work on a lot of the features in question for ES6 started before Dart was available. You can't be retroactively influenced.

But he is basically saying he wasn't influenced except in the places he was influenced like the CoffeeScript fat arrow and the Dart SIMD stuff in ES7. This is an argument about degrees of influence, not whether or not he was influenced (as he admitted that.) This is not a winnable argument by anyone, I have to move on.

See my reply above. You've changed from multiple false claims of influence, so ginned up to a high degree of influence that you concluded with a fulsome "Thank you Dart for showing us the way!", to "any influence at all", and "don't hassle me about differences of degree of influence!"

So, really sloppy original comment with multiple false claims. Should I just put up with that as part of HN's descent to /. quality? :-(

/be

John McCutchan caught my attention early on and my hat goes off to him. He brought a unique perspective to advancing performance. I went from Dart to TypeScript to pure JavaScript for a variety of reasons, and I must say productivity in Dart is higher, sometimes much higher. However the Dart2js output and interface makes it less attractive despite higher productivity. I took from the announcement that Google will focus on fixing that, which is encouraging. It's really the only way forward for Dart, since no one else, and now Chrome, is going to include the VM.

> I took from the announcement that Google will focus on fixing that, which is encouraging.

That's exactly right. We have a bunch of people working feverishly on more human-friendly JS output:

https://github.com/dart-lang/dev_compiler