Making Dart a Better Language for UI

medium.com

11 points·skybrian··3 comments

"We’re a lot closer to the nasty low-level imperative code that drives people to using templates. When we looked at real Flutter code, we were sad to see a lot that looked like this. So, about a year ago, the Flutter team asked us on Dart to come up with language changes to make UI code written in Dart easier to write, read, and maintain."

Nothing about this code snippet is "nasty" or "low-level". It is trivially easy to write and understand. It is fully maintainable due to its simplicity and clarity.

It's sad to see that developers think this is somehow bad code. It probably takes a lot of experience to understand why it is totally fine.

Too many developers are lost trading added complexity for aesthetics. One more way to write the same thing. One more thing that will be inconsistent across the codebase. One more thing to learn how to read. It all adds up. All the tooling has to be updated to support this stuff. How will it look and feel in the debugger? (Does Dart even have proper debugger support?)

In the end, all you get is the looks of being declarative while having none of the benefits of being declarative.

"Nasty" may be an exaggeration, but readability improvements do matter.

Yes, Dart has a debugger, not to mention "hot reload" that's a big selling point for Flutter. The Dart team maintains their own tools and is well aware of the cost of maintaining and improving them.

The way list comprehensions are a logical consequence of the new features rather than an intended feature themselves is very satisfying, and speaks to the general and composable nature of the new features. This was an exciting read!

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