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Comment by acron0 | Hacker News Reader

So, the author's justification is that Apple now has Swift for iOS, so Google should bring Dart to Android.

In my opinion, Swift, although great for shepherding more devs onto the Apple platform, fundamentally directs us further away from the fabled 'write once' dream. Introducing Dart to Android would just further this back-and-forth between proprietary platform holders.

And Microsoft, once again, is left utterly bemused, as it decided to focus away from proprietary languages and allow people to write native apps in JavaScript. But now people are excited about Swift, so is vendor-specific languages what people wanted all along?! How confusing.

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I think people, or at least people like me, want languages that don't suck to develop in. Write once is great, but being able to spit some code out without really old language cruft getting in the way would be nice too. Objective-C was written forever ago. I don't want to type 30 character method names and write 6 lines of code to do simple "map" operations. Swift and Dart make these things better. They are hopefully fast enough to also not make the end product not suck too. I've worked at at least a handful of companies doing both iOS and Android and they've all done multiple versions of the same app; these write-once libraries and projects just don't do it well enough IMHO.

The long method names really have nothing to do with Objective-C, and all with Apple's naming conventions...which are the same with Swift.

Plus intellisense means its a solved problem.

They're partly related to Objective-C not having namespaces (as far as I'm aware).

You're totally correct and I certainly don't disagree that Swift is an improvement to Obj-C. I just wish some one [who counts, i.e. not Microsoft, apparently] would just attempt to pick up the 'write once' torch.

Except that Dart compiles to JavaScript so you can still 'write once' and have it run anywhere. Also I don't really see how Dart is "proprietary" since it is being standardized in Ecma TC52 and is licensed under the BSD license.

> Also I don't really see how Dart is "proprietary" since it is being standardized in Ecma TC52 and is licensed under the BSD license.

I guess most people feel that it's some OOXML-like rubber-stamping process. Or how many of Darts numerous flaws have been fixed in ECMA through the participation of other members?

> OOXML-like rubber-stamping process

Compare Dart and Microsoft OOXML is unfare.

- OOXML implementation is not open source nor under BSD licence

- Poorly defined => 6546 pages vs 867 pages for ODF to achieve the same goal

- Given the huge amount of work Microsoft decided to go with... the fast track ISO procedure!

- Corruption of ISO members?

- ...

> how many of Darts [...] flaws have been fixed in ECMA [...]?

None yet, it is just the beginning of TC52.

I'm skeptical that write-once would truly catch on; it typically requires stronger architectural skills than most devs want to undertake.

I suspect most devs actually want a universal platform they can get native-like UIs with while only writing UI code once. Although I don't think that would work out well either (it seems a little soon to be re-learning the lessons of Swing).

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