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Comment by bergwerf | Hacker News Reader

I feel like at this point Dart suffers from being a Google project: Google decides its fate, and Google has built a rather poor reputation when it comes to stability. I don't have concrete evidence, but I think the Google culture adheres more to the rolling release and move fast and break things ideology. I personally witnessed several of my own Dart projects needing serious refactoring after just a few years.

Also, I feel like Dart is a maximalist project. "Batteries included" also means a whole myriad of tools and libraries also at the grace of the Google Dart team.

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I think the main problem for Dart was that Typescript is simply the better approach for fixing Javascript (even though TS has its own share of problems with its 'kitchen sink type system').

> even though TS has its own share of problems with its 'kitchen sink type system'

Eh, people critique the kitchen sink type system but at the end of the day that system is why TypeScript took over, not a weird add-on you have to put up with to get it. It's what makes it possible to assign comprehensive types to ~every JS library, which is what allows TypeScript to gradually eat the whole JS ecosystem.

Any other approach stops short of the goal of being JS+Types, which means you end up with a different language with different semantics, which is where Dart failed.

Agreed for enabling gradually adding types to large JS code bases, but at the same time it's also used for very questionable 'template metaprogramming hacks' (which then result in pages-long and completely undecipherable error messages). It's a very similar problem to 'abusing' the C++ template system.

Go is doing exceptionally well while being a Google project. I don't think its a Google problem.

IMO Dart has become a niche Flutter language instead of a general-purpose language. Dart decided to focus on being a client-side language and it is very difficult to win over JS/TS.

I think that's because it's of use to google internally. Dart and lit probably don't find as much use.

Go had the name of its authors to weight in. While I'm not of the type to give high weight in term of technical assessment. And I don't even mean C is praisable in term of influence it had on the industry. But without a doubt it did impact it deeply over a very long span of time. And at larger scale many people do love to follow their unquestionable prophets.

Being at Google helped, not that Alef, Limbo, Newsqueak and Oberon-2 were that huge commercial successes, and there is also the question how much influence would have C had in the industry if AT&T would be selling it from the get go, instead of the way UNIX and C were freely distributed across universities.

Many times it isn't the quality of the programming language alone, rather external factors that trigger its adoption.

It suffers from being the Flutter language, it was already given as dead outside Google, had it not been for Flutter.

I also advise watching the Angular documentary, where they briefly describe being forced to adopt Dart by management was a friction point, only sorted by letting them go with TypeScript, and AngularDart be its own thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRC9DlH45lA

It's a Google project: Batteries included, and once the batteries are empty, they throw the whole thing away

> I feel like at this point Dart suffers from being a Google project

Not only Dart. Lit was completely abandoned without any public announcement. Soon it should be added to the killed by google website.

wtf are you taking about with “completely abandoned”? https://github.com/lit/lit/pulse/monthly

Abandoned doesn't mean dead (yet). Google don't care and don't spend a dime on it anymore but they "forgot" to tell that to people using lit.

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