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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

When dart was released its authors asked for and received, some very specific feedback about syntax which they mentioned they'd be amenable to changing. Nothing has changed.

Much like android dart is controlled by a small group of engineers in Google. Where's the source code to the current HEAD of dart? I'm pretty sure it's not on GitHub. What features are planned for the next release? I'm fairly sure dart-discuss doesn't exist publicly.

Dark doesn't belong to the web developer community. No conspiracy theory needed, dart is built to suit googles purposes, which is fine. The only thing is expecting people to use it and think its a successor to JS, which, for all the flaws of JS, it is not.

Google know what a community developed successor to JS looks like. Optional strong typing in even MS typescript is more popular than dart. Get together with the community or dart will be he next GWT.

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Current HEAD of dart: https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/#svn%2Fbranches...

Most of the work is done completely in the open. See some of the language discussion writeups: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!searchin/mi...

We went public two years ago when the language was still in its infancy so that developers could provide their feedback.

Edit: contrary to your claim we did get feedback and acted on it. Some changes were rejected (like putting the types behind the variables), but it's normal that not every request can be accepted.

If you have suggestions on how we can make Dart even more open-source I would be genuinely interested in hearing them.

Thanks for the link. It appears to be a subversion repo. Is that correct?

The most popular feedback from HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3092558 and Twitter was was less verbose syntax. AFAICT dart remains as chatty as the day it was announced.

The main repository is currently SVN. When Chromium switches over to Git, we will probably follow suit. At some point there was a clone on Github, but I don't know by heart if it still exists.

Syntax is almost like a religion. You can't make everyone happy. So yes: although we changed the syntax in some areas, we kept the C-like syntax.

Fwiw you can't satisfy every feedback. There are always people that want to make Dart look and behave like their favorite language (be it Java, C#, JS, CS, Python or Ruby), then there are others that just want to boycott Dart, and finally there are simply conflicting views.

While we listened to every feedback we got, we found that feedback from people that had actually tried and used Dart to be the most helpful. They weren't always the loudest, but helped to make Dart a better language.

Nobody uses or likes Java for its syntax. They use it for safety. Languages designed since the have gotten progressively terser. That's not preference: that's good engineering: reasonable defaults, avoiding duplicate logic, avoiding surprise, and so forth. Good design is when there's nothing left to take away.

Nobody is asking you to make everyone happy. You could have made (and still have the opportunity to make) dart look like any modern web language - coffeescript, or Python, or ruby, and you'd have both users and a measurable impact on web development.

Have you written or read much Dart?

It's pretty damn concise and a far sight from Java. It's more concise in many cases than JavaScript (and only more verbose around things like type coercion where being explicit is a much safer choice). I admit though, that Dart is more verbose than Perl :)

C-style syntax doesn't have to mean verbose when you have features like short lambdas, optional types, string interpolation, operator overriding, getters and setters, setting instance vars directly from constructor parameters, fewer keywords, mixins, etc. C-style syntax also makes the language pretty much instantly readable, and if you're targeting web developers, being familiar to JavaScript, Java, C#, and ActionScript, is really important.

Honestly, Dart is the most readable language I've used, and that includes many years writing Python.

I wrote up why I think Dart is not the language you think it is here: http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-langu...

[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team]

> When dart was released its authors asked for and received, some very specific feedback about syntax which they mentioned they'd be amenable to changing. Nothing has changed.

This is simply not true! I've been following the language for a long time and they have made a lot of changes, they have listened to feedback. Just search 'BREAKING CHANGE' on the mailing lists. During the first year there were tons of changes to the language and libraries. Now they trying to stabilize the APIs

But at the same time they stayed very close to C/C++/Java syntax styles. A lot of people complained about a number of the syntax that the designers didn't want to change.

The designers have also made it very clear that the types next to a variable are basically useless at runtime (unless you turn on strict mode, which kills performance). Types are for tooling only, which seems silly.

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