Dart Disappoints Hackers | Hacker News Reader

Dart Disappoints Hackers

siliconangle.com

36 pointsDanielRibeiro18 comments

I see the need for javascript replacement, and Dart is a valid attempt at that.

What I can't see is rationale in inventing yet another language, when there are alternatives that already exist, have decent user base, and could be a good fit (see Lua, Ruby, Mirah, Coffescript).

Someone on the Clojure mailing list said that the best thing would be if VM/Runtime that will run Dart on non Chrome browsers could be reused/repurposed to run alternative languages like Coffescript or Clojurescript, it would be best possible solution.

> What I can't see is rationale in inventing yet another language

I can see that, if it's a significant improvement on the previous language for the user base.

That's not the case for Dart, I see a lot of truth in the quips "puts the Java back into Javascript" and "Takes a hard turn towards going back to more machine-friendly and less developer-friendly languages".

New languages are a fine thing, but Dart is neither original nor interesting, it's mostly shoving back a heap-ful of Java into Javascript and calling it a day, that's not helpful.

Some sort of web IR all web languages could compile to would be useful (especially with broad support from other browser vendors), a chopped down Javascript with its problems fixed (JS 1.7's `let` instead of current `var`, "strict-mode" by default, structural types, typed object keys, an actual integer type) would be helpful, a "best subset" of Harmony would be helpful, Harmony itself would be helpful, a brand new language with PL concepts less than 30 years old would be helpful, but from what I've seen so far Dart is none of these.

What need is it you see exactly?

A sensational tech article based on the kneejerk reactions of HN :(

This project has a lot of potential and is extremely ambitious. This immediate "my favourite feature x" is missing, or petty bickering over semi colons betrays lack of insight, and depth.

It's not just missing features or bickering over semi-colons - the much bigger issue is the fragmentation highlighted by Brendan Eich and quoted in the article.

I'm sure the CEO of Myspace was similarly furrowing his brow when Facebook came out.

The guy "on the top" is always going to FUD and poo-poo the upstarts. Whether they make it or not should be left to their own merits, not what issues the existing hegemony has with it.

Any completely unfinished project has 'tons of potential'. Saying that Dart is extremely ambitious simply isn't supported by what Google has currently released, even if the leaked memo had suggested ambition. Too much of what Dart actually does could be done as a JS library, and as a result, the remainder has a hard time looking impressive when you're talking about an entirely new language and toolchain.

> This project [...] is extremely ambitious

Could you point out what you think is ambitious about it, apart from the ambition of trying to replace javascript of course?

I wish people would stop trying to make high level languages that run in the browser. Make a standard VM and then we can compile all languages to that! The need is clearly there, how much JavaScript today actually starts out as some other language and gets compiled to JS?

Stop trying to fix the syntax and just give me a way to have any language I want.

I don't understand why someone would learn to use Dart, Coffescript etc when the effort could be put into developing a deeper understanding of javascript.

All I ever hear from developers sometimes is how browser X is breaking standards and then something like this comes along and I can't help but face palm. I'm embarrassed by the relentless pursuit of non-existent perfection from the developer community. Sometimes you just need to get the job done with the tools you have, and and learn to fucking use them instead of pursuing the grail.

Yes. Maybe it's time to consider Dart an experimentation, for which the jury is still out, and stick to older languages with serious ecosystem when it comes to production.

Learning more and more about JavaScript will give you diminishing returns after a while. Once you understand prototype-based inheritance, common patterns and idioms, and how objects and integers work and have gone through the language spec, you might be better off as an individual starting to learn something completely different.

Dart and CoffeeScript are just other languages, so getting a rough handle on them should take an hour or so per. Just learning what concepts languages bring to the table (e.g. how does Dart do concurrency and how does that compare to JavaScript? How does it compare to Erlang?) can give you better insight into trends and the state of the art, and can give you new ideas about what is possible. IMHO, this is worth doing even if you're never going to use the language.

As for "breaking standards", as long as my JS still runs on Chrome, I'm more than content no matter what Dart does.

The design goals for Dart look suspiciously like the original goals for Java, particularly Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn. In the case of Java, that just got us a crippled, verbose knock-off of C++. Hmm.

I would have liked a scala flavored effort...duh!

And I wanted Python, but it's not like Google actually considers things that already exist when making new things.

On the bright side, nobody's gonna adopt this. :3

Or Go-flavored.

More like "Google shocked to discover that nobody is on their friend list anymore".

They've gone to great lengths to make every software and hardware company on the planet their enemy. They would've had to really knock it out of the park.

How so? I still like a lot of their products and APIs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com