seenickcode

Hi there, I'm the author of the article. I'd like to clarify that it's not bad at all. Libs exist out there, such as offering a cross platform nav bar, seemless where you wouldn't have to maintain two separate codebases. Also for things like forms, if you have a custom design, you won't be having a lot of "if/else" statements, you'd simply use one set of widgets since they'd be custom.

Hey gkya, I'm the author of the post. I basically have been a long time Mac user and now I have a window machine with a VM with Xubuntu where I do all my dev (I only game on windows). When I want to test cross platform I use my wife's Macbook pro. When I develop and maybe don't have enough RAM to use an Android Emulator, I've found running the app on a real device works well actually.

Yep good point.

A huge amount of people out there try to avoid JS like the plague, hence the popularity of TypeScript, so yep, if I can learn Dart in an afternoon and have the ability to write hybrid mobile apps then it's plenty worth it.

Re "Angular, one of Google most successful projects, uses TypeScript and not Dart, let that sink in.": Google is also promoting AngularDart as well, "Hundreds of Google engineers use AngularDart to build the sophisticated, mission-critical apps that bring in much of Google’s revenue." https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular/

"Demise of so many projects from Google" I agree with (sans the popularity of Go).

Flutter is in alpha so time will tell if Google will put enough funding/focus into it.

Good points. After writing native mobile apps with ObjC, Swift etc I still prefer strong typed languages like Go, TypeScript, etc.

I can't believe how easy Dart is to learn, especially having a TypeScript background myself.

Hey thx for the comment. Per the post, I already stated I don't much experience yet and that will change come next mo. But wanted to simply emphasize that after working with RN that I'm quite excited about Flutter.

Re the JS hate, it's more of "JS exhaustion" but yes I'm strongly opinionated. Hopefully WebAssembly will cure this down the road who knows. For example, it's almost 2018 and folks are still trying to settle on something as fundamental as React Native navigation. I guess with the dev landscape now the JS love/hate varies.

Re the hiring pool that's a great point. But hiring JS devs sometimes is like hiring PHP devs: if you're doing something simple it's no problem, but more complex then you get lots of horrible candidates to sift through until you hopefully manage to find someone good/with a proper programming education. But I guess it also greatly depends on the hiring location too.

Re adoption, I think if you're a web dev already, you're used to it, but if you're a backend dev or native mobile dev it's something hard to deal with.

I guess I can point out some situations:

1. People who can tolerate JS but no mobile dev exp yet

-> React Native is a great option.

2. Existing native mobile engineers used to compiled languages like Swift or Java and who want to pick up a hybrid dev framework

-> Flutter, (while still in alpha) has a ton of potential.

Note that anyone who knows Ruby, Go, C#, etc etc can easily pick up Dart in less than a day.

As stated in my original post, I do plan to re-write some of my apps with Flutter and I will be reporting about my experiences for better or worse.