Who is behind Dart? | Hacker News Reader

Who is behind Dart?

blossom.co

105 pointstosh27 comments

"When you look at Ruby you will find Matz and DHH".

This is wrong. Matz (and only Matz) is the one you will find. DHH wrote a web framework with Ruby, but he hasn't contributed to Ruby at all. Ruby existed 10 years before Rails came into fruition.

He probably meant to say Ruby (and Rails)? Didn't Rails contribute greatly to the popularity of Ruby itself though - I think it would hard to argue otherwise.

>Ruby existed 10 years before Rails came into fruition.

And had 1/10th the popularity it had after Rails.

That's true, but it's irrelevant to the point. Listing DHH as one of the "creators" of Ruby, like this article does, needlessly spreads misinformation. Frankly, it's not fair to Matz and the Ruby dev team to list DHH as a creator of the language. DHH invented a web framework that greatly popularized the language, true, but Ruby was single-handedly created by Matz.

BTW, not everyone who uses Ruby uses Rails. Ruby is a general purpose programming language that is used by many people for solving many different problems.

I never saw Ruby in production without Rails.

So what? That doesn't change the fact that DHH didn't have anything to do with the creation of Ruby.

From my point of view as an outsider, if it wasn't for Rails, Ruby would never had reached mainstream, even though many of its ideas were already available in other stacks.

Also AFAIK many of the Rails use cases drive Ruby's design.

So in a way, DHH was influential to get Ruby adopted.

I don't see the point in muddling the distinction between creating something and making it popular.

If it wasn't for MFC, C++ (which was released in 1983) might not have reached the widespread adoption it did in the 90's.

Yet, I would wager most people wouldn't argue that Microsoft should be mentioned along with Bjarne Stroustrup when talking about the creators behind C++.

> If it wasn't for MFC, C++ (which was released in 1983) might not have reached the widespread adoption it did in the 90's.

I always smile at that urban legend. It belongs to the same place as game consoles use OpenGL for their APIs.

1 - Microsoft was the last C compiler vendor to add C++ to their toolchain in MS-DOS with the 7.0 version of their compiler. Everyone else already had C++ support.

2 - The first generations of C++ developers targeting Windows were using Borland C++ with OWL, followed by C++ Builder. This started to change after Borland's management went crazy.

3 - Before JEE, enterprise distributed computing was done on UNIX systems with C++ and CORBA.

4 - OS/2 had a C++ framework similar ot COM, but more powerful with support for metaclasses and other Smalltalk ideas

5 - The Taligent project being developed by IBM and Apple were based on C++

6 - Apple replaced their Object Pascal code with C for the lowlevel APIs and the C++ framework PowerPlant

7 - The Lisp Machines vendor, Lucid tried to sell a C++ IDE with Lisp like features still not available in modern C++ IDE's

8 - IBM started to move OS/400 code from the PL/I dialect into C++

9 - Many C++ MS-DOS developers were already enjoying C++ frameworks via Turbo Vision

I could provide lots of more examples.

MFC only became usable when Visual Studio moved into 32bits world. And even then, the mismanagement from Symantec, Borland, Watcom and Metrowerks were a bigger reason for developers to move to Visual Studio than anything else.

If developers now complain about the slowness of the modern Microsoft to adopt the C++ standard, back then it was even worse.

Visual Studio was the IE 6 of C++ compilers, with language features for COM and ATL taking priority over ANSI C++ compliance.

As former C++ dev I appreciate all the support the modern Microsoft gives to the community, but having MFC responsible for C++'s adoption in the industry, really?!?

I know that DHH did not create Ruby. My goal was just to show that looking at the people who build a language ecosystem helps to better understand the tools themselves.

Rails (as one of the main use cases for Ruby) definitely influenced the direction of Ruby as well as what the community regards as a typical Ruby code base.

That said, I can see how mentioning DHH might come across as misleading, I should have added more people to the other language/platform examples as well.

The list of people I covered is just the tip of the iceberg that makes Dart (not even talking about the broader community!).

It's always fascinating to learn about the people behind a technology as well as who the early adopers are whether that's Dart or Clojure or Elixir.

You have this set of people who create something new and this set of people who want to and can adopt it. It's fascinating.

tosh, I have become more and more interested in Dart recently and was wondering where you use it in the company?

I have read Quire's (http://www.quire.io) article on using Dart to develop their application and it seemed very positive. I just wondered about your experience.

You can take a look here: http://simonpai.github.io/2014/09/03/quire-building-with-dar...

Right now we use Dart for the desktop browser optimized version of Blossom and for a bunch of command line/build tools to manage things like building, testing, release tagging and deployment.

We're super happy with the language and platform. DartPad (https://dartpad.dartlang.org/) is a great way to get a feeling for the tool support of Dart (semantic autocompletion, helpful warnings etc).

I'll write more about Dart and how we use it at Blossom (https://www.blossom.co) going forward.

This is a great article! very excited to what we will see at Dart Developer Summit 2015

Dart has a very talented team but they have not filled its potential yet if one is judging by popularity and perception.

It's still early days for Dart. Go was started in 2007, Python in 1991, Ruby in 1995. It takes some time for a platform and ecosystem to become established.

The only issue here is Dart is a special case. It relies on being transpiled to run on its intended platform versus running natively. None of the other languages had this type of issue. I feel like this is slowing down Dart adoption perhaps even stalling it.

Perhaps if a native Dart runtime becomes included into web browsers we will see it grow I just have a hard time seeing it without that piece.

Dart also works outside of browsers. The standalone VM can be used to write command line tools and web servers. You can interact with native libraries and you can also embed it in other applications. It offers excellent tooling and good performance. It's quite a bit faster than Ruby, Python, or PHP (Hack included).

There is also a second JIT-free VM called "Fletch" in the works which is meant for locked-down environments like iOS or Sony's PS4.

Ah today I learned; thanks! I'm not sure how big of a market that is with node / io but that's a neat idea.

Go was an evolution of a language developed years earlier, but with a new name because it was different enough or because the inventor got a new employer/copyright-holder

> a language developed years earlier

Are you referring to Limbo?

That's not true at all.

It use to take some time, back in the days when Python and Ruby appeared.

Now, with the net et al, languages are adopted much much faster. Go did in a 5 years what too Python 10 years to achieve. Even a transpiled novelty language like Coffescript, caught on widely in just a year or so.

And of course for company sponsored languages, the time to adoption is much much lower. Java appeared and conquered the enterprise space in just 2-3 years. C# got wide adoption in 2 years or so from the MS shops.

Unfortunately it seems that TypeScript will kill it - especially now that Angular team will use it. Google was not brave enough to push for native Dart VM inside of Chrome, promoting Dart for Android etc. Also Go cannibalizes it in a way. Both are not DSLs, but general-purpose languages, share same paradigm, why would a company create two?

Dart is nice. I wish Dart and Golang teams had more intersection...

Dart is never take off as long as is competing with TypeScript.

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