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Comment by beatpanda | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Dart is supposed to be good, someone please explain it to me like I'm an eight-year-old

It's not right now. It's a lousy CoffeeScript. The thing that makes dart good is that it could, some day, have it's own runtime. Also, the language is being designed by the team that did v8. So I'd imagine they plan to build support into chrome at some point.

I agree CoffeeScript has nicer syntax, but it retains all of Javascript's semantic warts. Whatever quibbles you might have about Dart's syntax (it's young yet!) it's semantics are much nicer than Javascript.

Well, except for the unsound covariant generics, the lack of an arguments object, and the implicit downcasts, and so on...

Hint: Dart is a dynamically typed language. The covariant generics and the implicit downcasts are there on purpose.

The lack of an arguments object is a feature not a bug. A rest argument like in Lisp is much better for optimization. The design isn't done yet given that Dart has optional arguments a rest argument would fit in.

I agree CoffeeScript has nicer syntax, but it retains all of Javascript's semantic warts

that comes across as both patronising and ignorant (although it could be me who's the latter). any examples of "all Javascript's semantic warts" coffeescript retains?

> I don't understand why Dart is supposed to be good

It's like Go: "It's from google, so awesome by default".

Go is awesome by default because of Ken Thompson, not because of Google.

And Dart is awesome by default because of Gilad Bracha :P

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