But if it was Polymer with native iOS/Android support, now then this would've been a different story! When I compare all the recent front-end frameworks, Polymer still is the most appealing to me, I wish it had a bit more steam behind it.
FWIW, I was able to write two small but useful program in Dart in one day, without any experience with the language at all:
- A script to convert CSV file to SELECT ... UNION ALL SELECT ... statements
- A script to parse my timesheet (in Emacs' org-mode) & insert it into my client's timesheet database
I just used these 3 resources:
[1] Dart language tour https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language
[2] Standard library introduction https://www.dartlang.org/guides/libraries
[3] Standard library reference (like JavaDocs) https://api.dartlang.org/stable/1.24.2/index.html
[4] And the pub package manager https://www.dartlang.org/tools/pub
Polymer is a thin layer of sugar on top of the web platform, it's 100% web, it doesn't make sense outside of the browser because it doesn't have its own special component model, it literally just directly subclasses HTMLElement to provide sugar, that's it.
I think you might like working with Dart. The entire ecosystem is standardized. And if you do Flutter stuff, Flutter is the only framework.
Learning the language isn't a big deal. You already know most of the syntax and its semantics are straightforward.
You can try doing some Hello World stuff over at DartPad:
As for not wanting to learn Dart, if you are currently developing mobile apps for one platform (say Android) and you want to port your apps to the other platform (say iOS) then unless you already know the languages and libraries used by that other platform (say Swift or Objective-C) then you already have to learn a new language. Wouldn't it be better to learn something like Dart that compiles natively on both platforms? Then you can just write one program. In particular, maintenance is much easier.
(disclaimer, I like Flutter so much I just joined the Flutter team)
Not to mention Elm.