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I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is ow

I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google. Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch. You're free to look at how great it is, feel it's well refined curves and admire the finish, but God help you if you don't like how the project is going and want to fork it for yourself. Don't bother trying to commit a new feature to any of Google's software that they don't agree with. It will languish forever. Don't bother forking either, because they'll build a small proprietary bit into it that grows like a tumor until it's impossible to run the "open source" code without it. Fuck dart, I don't care how great it is. Microsoft is being the good one in this case by extending js with typescript, google is trying to upend it into something that they control

skybrian 10y ago
But the thing is, you really can fork. There's nothing preventing forking. I think you're complaining about merging. But every open source project has standards about what they merge. Try getting a patch into Linux and see what they say; it won't be a rubber stamp.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Yeah, you can fork. Take AMP or Android for example. With AMP, the instant you fork and change a single character of code it becomes incompatible because part of AMP is a verifier that makes sure only the official version is used with Google's cache. Without being able to serve your custom AMP pages from Google's AMP cache the entire point to its existence goes away. The reason? Typical "security". "Tampered" versions of AMP could "do bad things", laughable considering that vanilla web pages allow you to do absolutely anything javascript allows and google has no problem showing those pages in search results or letting them freewheel in a Chrome tab. If Google wanted AMP to be open they would have built it into their chrome browser so the browser could enforce restrictions while allowing users to run whatever customized AMP implementation they want. And Android. Android used to honor the promise of being open. Years ago. This was before every manufacturer was encouraged to lock bootloaders, and back when platform SDK's and drivers for hardware were generally available even if they were kinda hard to get. This was also before the Android kernel heavily diverged from mainline Linux, and before "google play services" grew from a tiny app to a framework that powers half the OS features. Nowadays you can only run your own Android on devices specifically built for it. Open distributions like CyanogenMod are dead or dying. Google Play services is closed and proprietary, and probably about 95% of popular apps require it to work. Even if you manage to get your own Android distribution built and running you will need to side load all your apps, and most apps just don't work because they've been built to depend on proprietary bits that Google has snuck in all over the place. Google is better at the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy than Microsoft ever was. So good, in fact, that they have many well intentioned people defending them to the death even as they choke off the very open source projects they created. Virtually every platform that Google runs for more than about 5 years goes from completely open to something impractical to run yourself. If you don't believe me look into any of their older projects that are "open source". After a certain point it's free software as in "free coupons". Somewhere in the mix, eventually, the price of of their "charity" is passed on to you.
  - thunderbong 10y ago
    Thank you. I wonder how many open source advocates recognize this.
    - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
      Thanks so much. I get a lot of downvotes and use throwaways because of comments like this, so it's nice to hear some praise every once in a while. Google's projects all seem very inviting from a distance. Usually it's not until you're ready to implement something that you find out that you're fucked, and how. Serious ranting below but something I never get a chance to say: I'm a born skeptic and avoid the silicon valley mindset even though I'm a driven person. I used to find myself often in disagreement with others because they don't or refuse to see the truth. Some people don't like to be told they're wrong. Many of those will fight other opinions just to justify their own decision, but will secretly reconsider. Others will hang onto beliefs with every ounce of strength as their mistake builds into a Maelstrom that consumes everything they care about. With some people, after challenging their beliefs, they will end a friendship rather than admit you were right in the first place. Especially if you refused to do something their way and it saved them from disaster. Some can't stand to be THAT wrong. As if I was some asshole who saved them from their fate, and now they're a spirit left wandering the earth until they can fulfill their original destiny. Its like I helped them cheat without telling them about it, stealing the joy from victory. This is something I learned the hard way more than once. In real life I keep my opinions to myself to avoid this nastiness, and offer opinion only when asked. The people open to advice even if they disagree learn to ask my opinion since I always tend to have one. The majority of people I know, including some good friends, have no idea what my personal opinions are on many subjects. It would cause pointless pain and argument with people I care about regardless of their beliefs. I'm not loyal to any platform or company and I will freely throw a strongly held notion to the wind if I find disturbing evidence that I was mistaken. Most people are not so malleable. A lot of people take their beliefs too seriously to the detriment of society. At least on the internet I can express my opinion, however "uncool" using throwaways. In the real world the best and most meticulously researched advice I've ever given is at exit interviews. The one time you can be open, honest, and politically incorrect with coworkers. Multiple companies made serious operational changes after giving my exit interview. Others have told me in nicer words "that's really fucking great to hear I'm pretty happy I never have to talk to you again". The problem is, you never know how somebody will respond. During exit interviews I'm treated more like a person than a subordinate since the boss relationship is formally over, which helps I'm sure. In real life, the way to influence a strongly held opinion is best decribed by watching the movie Inception. You introduce nothing more than minor inconsistencies while outwardly expressing little opinion, then wait to see if your clues are enough to lead them to towards the promised land. My other common tactic is to do things without asking any opinions first. You at most come off as insensitive, aloof, rather than someone to intentionally disregard their advice. Usually the opinion matters less in practice than if you had asked in the first place. Classic forgiveness is easier than permission. Ive sometimes wondered if this makes me a physcopath or if that's just how some people tick. Anyways, god bless throwaways and the internet
bitmapbrother 10y ago
WTF are you talking about? Dart is being used to develop apps on their Fuchsia OS.
cwp 10y ago
Give me a break. It's just as accurate to say "Dart is an open standard, Javascript is owned by Mozilla". There may be valid technical, pragmatic or moral reasons to prefer Javascript, but this is just FUD. (See http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-408.htm http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...)
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Really? Google's once rosy history with open source project isn't looking too friendly these days. And yeah ECMA is a totally open standard with committee members from all sorts of companies and backgrounds. Dart is not. I don't care if JS is slightly worse, as least I know that for now and the foreseeable future I won't be paying a google tax to use it. After the open source community "stole" mapreduce and hbase google has begun offering maglev and spanner as "services" rather than giving them to the OSS community. Maglev was supposed to be open sourced a while ago, and google now offers DDoS protection service on Google cloud instead, most famously with their Krebs PR stunt. Maybe they forgot about it? Did I mention they removed "don't be evil" as their motto a while back because it was "immature"? Google has begun down a decidedly different path since the Alphabet transition a while back. It's no longer the brainchild of Sergey and Larry, it's losing its soul and becoming a shareholder cash machine. Maybe the floundering of some of their moonshot projects is taking a toll on the companies' confidence to remain a market leader while maintaining their traditional values of openness and shunning of questionable marketing tactics? I'll admit that's pure speculation but I really wish I knew what happened to the Google I remember. Since I'm being accused of FUD I might as well throw a bunch more speculation in for the hell of it. Their most recent papers are conspicuously lacking enough detail to make your own implementation, and read more like marketing whitepapers on how to use their services and how great they are. Their tensorflow library was probably released as truly open only because they couldn't hire enough devs with machine learning experience to meet their needs. They needed to introduce the world to enough of the secret sauce to meet their own demand and they remain completely silent on how their real moneymakers work. My extreme speculation? They started using machine learning for search a few years back and found out just how easily their previous search algorithms, developed and perfected for years, were utterly outclassed within months. A start-up with these techniques could have been their undoing. This oversight cannot be repeated, they cannot offer too much of their technology back to the world anymore lest they risk being beaten to death by their own weapons. Thus google threw away a lot of what made them google, and rebuilt themselves as a semi monopolistic oligarch that's much more in line with traditional too big to fail companies. They now spend more on political lobbyists than any tech company by far. They like to release nice things for free when a competitor just happens to be a making a decent living charging for the same thing. They engage in a lot of the typical corporate warfare now that doesn't seem natural for a company with a nice playful exterior and an original motto of "don't be evil". As far as the FUD accusation, does it count that I don't work for or with any company that has anything to do with google or the other tech giants? These are just my opinions based on observations, and a lot of those opinions are backed by verifiable facts. You're free to put the same data together and make your own conclusions, which would lead to more interesting discussion than dismissing my points just because.
frik 10y ago
Microsoft is lobbying to get their favorite syntax into JS6/7. Who wanted the class syntax? etc And TypeScript and WebAssembly are part of their plan. Ultimately, they want to recompile their 27 year old Office codebase from C/C++ to web browser.
- caltelt 10y ago
  To be fair, it seems to me like the typical webdev coming from C#/Java really wants the class syntax. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's just MS that's pushing it through, and even if it is, there's definitely an audience for it.
  - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    I've used a ton of languages over the years and vastly prefer Java type syntax when working on larger projects. The forced organization tends to lead towards some level of mandatory code clarity. Something greatly lacking in Js land. OO is a bad word these days and functional is all the rage, even though functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering. There's a huge push to put more structured language concepts into js now that it's being used for substantial projects and it's out of necessity more than convenience. When I'm hacking together a quick Python script all that stuff gets in the way but when working on larger systems strong typing and object syntax are practically a neccesary evil for maintaining readability
    - bertrand-caron 10y ago
      Could you elaborate on how "functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering" ?
      - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
        Erlang and common lisp have been around for a long time, and functional programming is nothing new. The reality is that most business problems map conceptually to communication between objects, and that IDE's which greatly help developer productivity work a lot better with objects. Functional programming has origins in lambda calculus and academia because mathematical problems map more easily from pure math to functional programming. It's really popular in the circles where it's more useful/easier than OO. Honestly I don't think the people 20 years ago chose OO for most business languages over functional out of ignorance. They had a choice and decided that OO was better for business problem solving languages like Java even though a large majority of programmers from that era were math majors and familiar with functional syntax. I feel like we're in one of those cycles where a large number of a previous generation have retired and it's time to learn some of these lessons all over again. Notice how many wood commercial buildings have been going up in the last 15-20 years? A lot, and just long enough after everyone involved in all the great city fires of WW2 to be too dead to object.
kyrra 10y ago
Eh? Dart was trying to replace JavaScript in some fashion, but that obviously failed (they had good intentions, but bad execution). Seeing that Chrome hasn't included it yet, I doubt it will. So that dream is dead. Dart is a replacement for GWT at this point. See AdWords being written in dart now[0]. Though it's not clear now Flutter.io will play into all this (that's targeting mobile with no web target). As for typescript, Google actually embraced that fairly heavily with Angular2 being written in it. [0] http://news.dartlang.org/2016/03/the-new-adwords-ui-uses-dart-we-asked.html http://news.dartlang.org/2016/03/the-new-adwords-ui-uses-dar...
- afsina 10y ago
  AFAIK, Angular Dart is used heavily within Google. https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular
innocentoldguy 10y ago
JavaScript sucks because it has a weak standard library, ugly syntax, and its monopoly in web development has the industry stuck in a state of mediocrity, in my opinion. I have a VERY hard time believing that the apex of engineering intelligence and ingenuity is found in JavaScript. Also, as much as I love Elm, for instance, languages that transpile to JavaScript are just lipstick on a pig, and do little to solve the underlying problem. I'm not a fan of Dart either, but at least Google made an attempt to solve the JavaScript issue in the best way possible with Dart; by aiming to get rid of it.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  I agree with you that JavaScript sucks balls in far more ways than is reasonable for such a widely used language. The design is seriously shit when compared directly to really any popular language, even PHP. I disagree with transpilers not being a reasonable answer. Eventually JavaScript will be okay to work with, some day. Until then, transpilers offer nearly unlimited freedom in redesigning the bad parts of the language while maintaining 100% fowards and backwards compatibility. It's really as good as it can get. Since they compile down to a Turing complete language there's really no limit to the heaps of dog shit they can abstract away. Historically, c++ is nothing more than an insanely complicated C preprocessor and it has more than proven that such a strategy can be viable long term. In fact, the first c++ compiler made, cfront, is still available and literally outputs raw C code from c++. Typescript is easily my favorite since it's designed to compile down to very human friendly JS. Getting typescript out of your stack requires nothing more than one last compilation with optimizations turned off. Unlike most transpilers (looking at you babel) the output JavaScript uses standard JS workarounds like the crockerford privacy pattern for classes. This gives typescript fairly practical fowards and backwards compatibility. You can always target output to a newer version of js or convert your codebase out of typescript back to js at any time. If it catches enough traction, browsers will begin implementing native typescript parsing since it offers many potential performance optimizations on top of what js is capable of. At this point you just maintain your typescript codebase and use some library to give your legacy clients some transpiled J S on the fly. If typescript gets enough adoption it will fix JavaScript for good, in the same way the original c++ compiler (which just transformed to c) led to native support, so I'm really rooting for it.
isoos 10y ago
Looks like alternative facts have reached the tech world too? You can take as hard look at Google as you would like, but choosing Microsoft over Google (one for-profit company over another), while not caring how the technology, the licensing or the workflow compares is a bit hypocrite. (e.g.they are both open, and they both have rules of commits). I'm wondering, why do you need a throwaway for such heavily invested FUD? Your other comments here are in similar tone, and I'm surprised to see such hatred without any obvious trigger. Maybe if you would come forward with your story, it would be easier to discuss it? disclaimer: ex-Googler, worked with Dart for 4+ years, I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.
- mememachine 10y ago
  Associating your real name with a controversial opinion is basically just a bad idea.
  - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    Exactly. Even if you're right it won't do you any good
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Typescript and dart are completely different animals. I can leave typescript for good by compiling to js once and it's designed to output human readable code. The js it produces will be immediately usable as javascript, and I'm totally free from the semi open language that MS controls. Dart is a different language, it has no fallback to something familiar. I don't doubt that it's many years ahead of TS in every way but it's still rather proprietary compared to TS that I can shut off at any time with minimal effort. The openness of typescript and dart are comparable. Both being run primarily by their champion companies with code free to review and fork but with limited ability to commit changes. They both require you to sign over copyright of code committed which I don't like for my own reasons but the license is open source. The big difference to me is that typescript offers an escape hatch and dart does not, because one is pretty much a JavaScript enhancement and the other is completely different. I hate vendor lock-in and loss of the open web in general and you will see this as a common theme to most of my more flamey(controversial) comments. The web is closing off in so many directions and as an open source developer in my free time this is of great personal concern. I don't like that hackernews and reddit can be an echo chamber and posting contrary opinions usually makes the discussion more balanced even if a lot of people don't like it. I'm not ex google, MS, or any of the tech giants. I'm not smart or dedicated enough to work anywhere you've heard of :). Most of my comments on throwaway accounts are unpopular, that's why I don't use my normal account. I'm not some invisible super shill, hackernews knows all the accounts I use and I'm fine with that. I've just got my own opinions and when they're controversial it's not in my best interest to comment using my normal account. It wouldn't be for anyone. It would be utterly stupid to hurt my open source projects or reputation as a developer just because somebody doesn't like my opinions. My code and my work have no opinions, and I like to keep it that way. Throwaways are my way of keeping my opinions to myself, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Separation of church and state if you will. I'm not totally against Google or any company in general. Microsoft in particular has an extremely rocky history when it comes to open source projects. They've probably done more harm to Linux than any company in existence. If typescript and dart both had equal migration paths I would choose dart in a heartbeat. I love tsickle and the closure compiler and the fact that the angular team is using typescript. Still, I feel like my criticism of dart has some truth to it at least. I've taken aim at Google for the past week for what they've done to the openness of Android, AMP, and dart. Am I wrong? It's hard to argue that any of Google's platforms are as open as they were a few years ago. Some of my really unpopular opinions were posted in reponse to other poster calling me FUD or a shill, and can you blame me? It's one thing to say "I disagree and this is why" but pretty rude to just say "I don't believe you because you're obviously lying or getting paid to say that". To that I say well screw you I'll post what I want without being polite at all if you're going to be so rude. I'm replying nicely to you because you genuinely asked why I used a throwaway and said that you worked with dart at Google, way more than most would admit. Having an unpopular opinion just gets you labelled as a shill or FUD and that's a lot of the reason I use throwaways. I've actually gotten death threats before for disagreeing with people on the internet. It's hard to say I would be better off getting death threats from people that can easily find my name, occupation, and address. Look at more of my post history and you'll see that I'm probably not a shill, or a really sneaky one if you don't want to believe that. I just bashed Intel for removing ECC support from their desktop lines a few days ago, and Facebook and Microsoft a day before that for their shittastic timeline algorithm and irrational fear of Linux taking over corporate clients respectively. A day before that I trashed PayPal for some of their recent cronyism and praised the quality of Google's Guava libraries. In my more ancient post history I mention how much C#'s ecosystem sucks compared to java and how even open sourcing the language doesn't mean much when it only targets windows using visual studio. I bitched about the baby boomers screwing the mellenials and asked how it's possible to start a side business. I said I don't like Python because it's slow and gave people online marketing tips on how I write high ranking blog articles. I mentioned that .NET core sounds great but it's alpha quality and it sucks that I have to use the new version of Windows server to have http2 support. I talked about how WordPress is absolute shit for anything even medium traffic. Mentioned a quip about using monotonic grey codes. Brought up some arguments about montsanto and GM windblown crops. Mentioned that Uber doesn't give a fuck about their drivers and some examples of this despite their press releases saying otherwise. I'm getting a lot of comments about how I'm some full of shit corporate mouthpiece again so I guess it's time to cycle the old throwaway again. I'm not asking you to agree but keep in mind that some people will have opinions completely contrary to your own. Sometimes their reasoning will be logical even though you come to a different conclusion, people are just different
netheril96 10y ago
If Dart ever became the real thing, it must be supported in not just Google Chrome, but also Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc. At that point Google will lose its control.
- afsina 10y ago
  Google has decided not to put Dart VM in Chrome long ago. Of course Dart tools has very strong web development support and JS conversion.
mswift42 10y ago
Can you name one open source project, where I can commit a change the maintainer doesn't agree with?

skybrian 10y ago

But the thing is, you really can fork. There's nothing preventing forking. I think you're complaining about merging. But every open source project has standards about what they merge. Try getting a patch into Linux and see what they say; it won't be a rubber stamp.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
Yeah, you can fork. Take AMP or Android for example. With AMP, the instant you fork and change a single character of code it becomes incompatible because part of AMP is a verifier that makes sure only the official version is used with Google's cache. Without being able to serve your custom AMP pages from Google's AMP cache the entire point to its existence goes away. The reason? Typical "security". "Tampered" versions of AMP could "do bad things", laughable considering that vanilla web pages allow you to do absolutely anything javascript allows and google has no problem showing those pages in search results or letting them freewheel in a Chrome tab. If Google wanted AMP to be open they would have built it into their chrome browser so the browser could enforce restrictions while allowing users to run whatever customized AMP implementation they want. And Android. Android used to honor the promise of being open. Years ago. This was before every manufacturer was encouraged to lock bootloaders, and back when platform SDK's and drivers for hardware were generally available even if they were kinda hard to get. This was also before the Android kernel heavily diverged from mainline Linux, and before "google play services" grew from a tiny app to a framework that powers half the OS features. Nowadays you can only run your own Android on devices specifically built for it. Open distributions like CyanogenMod are dead or dying. Google Play services is closed and proprietary, and probably about 95% of popular apps require it to work. Even if you manage to get your own Android distribution built and running you will need to side load all your apps, and most apps just don't work because they've been built to depend on proprietary bits that Google has snuck in all over the place. Google is better at the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy than Microsoft ever was. So good, in fact, that they have many well intentioned people defending them to the death even as they choke off the very open source projects they created. Virtually every platform that Google runs for more than about 5 years goes from completely open to something impractical to run yourself. If you don't believe me look into any of their older projects that are "open source". After a certain point it's free software as in "free coupons". Somewhere in the mix, eventually, the price of of their "charity" is passed on to you.
- thunderbong 10y ago
  Thank you. I wonder how many open source advocates recognize this.
  - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    Thanks so much. I get a lot of downvotes and use throwaways because of comments like this, so it's nice to hear some praise every once in a while. Google's projects all seem very inviting from a distance. Usually it's not until you're ready to implement something that you find out that you're fucked, and how. Serious ranting below but something I never get a chance to say: I'm a born skeptic and avoid the silicon valley mindset even though I'm a driven person. I used to find myself often in disagreement with others because they don't or refuse to see the truth. Some people don't like to be told they're wrong. Many of those will fight other opinions just to justify their own decision, but will secretly reconsider. Others will hang onto beliefs with every ounce of strength as their mistake builds into a Maelstrom that consumes everything they care about. With some people, after challenging their beliefs, they will end a friendship rather than admit you were right in the first place. Especially if you refused to do something their way and it saved them from disaster. Some can't stand to be THAT wrong. As if I was some asshole who saved them from their fate, and now they're a spirit left wandering the earth until they can fulfill their original destiny. Its like I helped them cheat without telling them about it, stealing the joy from victory. This is something I learned the hard way more than once. In real life I keep my opinions to myself to avoid this nastiness, and offer opinion only when asked. The people open to advice even if they disagree learn to ask my opinion since I always tend to have one. The majority of people I know, including some good friends, have no idea what my personal opinions are on many subjects. It would cause pointless pain and argument with people I care about regardless of their beliefs. I'm not loyal to any platform or company and I will freely throw a strongly held notion to the wind if I find disturbing evidence that I was mistaken. Most people are not so malleable. A lot of people take their beliefs too seriously to the detriment of society. At least on the internet I can express my opinion, however "uncool" using throwaways. In the real world the best and most meticulously researched advice I've ever given is at exit interviews. The one time you can be open, honest, and politically incorrect with coworkers. Multiple companies made serious operational changes after giving my exit interview. Others have told me in nicer words "that's really fucking great to hear I'm pretty happy I never have to talk to you again". The problem is, you never know how somebody will respond. During exit interviews I'm treated more like a person than a subordinate since the boss relationship is formally over, which helps I'm sure. In real life, the way to influence a strongly held opinion is best decribed by watching the movie Inception. You introduce nothing more than minor inconsistencies while outwardly expressing little opinion, then wait to see if your clues are enough to lead them to towards the promised land. My other common tactic is to do things without asking any opinions first. You at most come off as insensitive, aloof, rather than someone to intentionally disregard their advice. Usually the opinion matters less in practice than if you had asked in the first place. Classic forgiveness is easier than permission. Ive sometimes wondered if this makes me a physcopath or if that's just how some people tick. Anyways, god bless throwaways and the internet

bitmapbrother 10y ago

WTF are you talking about? Dart is being used to develop apps on their Fuchsia OS.

cwp 10y ago

Give me a break. It's just as accurate to say "Dart is an open standard, Javascript is owned by Mozilla". There may be valid technical, pragmatic or moral reasons to prefer Javascript, but this is just FUD. (See http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-408.htm http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...)

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
Really? Google's once rosy history with open source project isn't looking too friendly these days. And yeah ECMA is a totally open standard with committee members from all sorts of companies and backgrounds. Dart is not. I don't care if JS is slightly worse, as least I know that for now and the foreseeable future I won't be paying a google tax to use it. After the open source community "stole" mapreduce and hbase google has begun offering maglev and spanner as "services" rather than giving them to the OSS community. Maglev was supposed to be open sourced a while ago, and google now offers DDoS protection service on Google cloud instead, most famously with their Krebs PR stunt. Maybe they forgot about it? Did I mention they removed "don't be evil" as their motto a while back because it was "immature"? Google has begun down a decidedly different path since the Alphabet transition a while back. It's no longer the brainchild of Sergey and Larry, it's losing its soul and becoming a shareholder cash machine. Maybe the floundering of some of their moonshot projects is taking a toll on the companies' confidence to remain a market leader while maintaining their traditional values of openness and shunning of questionable marketing tactics? I'll admit that's pure speculation but I really wish I knew what happened to the Google I remember. Since I'm being accused of FUD I might as well throw a bunch more speculation in for the hell of it. Their most recent papers are conspicuously lacking enough detail to make your own implementation, and read more like marketing whitepapers on how to use their services and how great they are. Their tensorflow library was probably released as truly open only because they couldn't hire enough devs with machine learning experience to meet their needs. They needed to introduce the world to enough of the secret sauce to meet their own demand and they remain completely silent on how their real moneymakers work. My extreme speculation? They started using machine learning for search a few years back and found out just how easily their previous search algorithms, developed and perfected for years, were utterly outclassed within months. A start-up with these techniques could have been their undoing. This oversight cannot be repeated, they cannot offer too much of their technology back to the world anymore lest they risk being beaten to death by their own weapons. Thus google threw away a lot of what made them google, and rebuilt themselves as a semi monopolistic oligarch that's much more in line with traditional too big to fail companies. They now spend more on political lobbyists than any tech company by far. They like to release nice things for free when a competitor just happens to be a making a decent living charging for the same thing. They engage in a lot of the typical corporate warfare now that doesn't seem natural for a company with a nice playful exterior and an original motto of "don't be evil". As far as the FUD accusation, does it count that I don't work for or with any company that has anything to do with google or the other tech giants? These are just my opinions based on observations, and a lot of those opinions are backed by verifiable facts. You're free to put the same data together and make your own conclusions, which would lead to more interesting discussion than dismissing my points just because.

frik 10y ago

Microsoft is lobbying to get their favorite syntax into JS6/7. Who wanted the class syntax? etc And TypeScript and WebAssembly are part of their plan. Ultimately, they want to recompile their 27 year old Office codebase from C/C++ to web browser.

caltelt 10y ago
To be fair, it seems to me like the typical webdev coming from C#/Java really wants the class syntax. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's just MS that's pushing it through, and even if it is, there's definitely an audience for it.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  I've used a ton of languages over the years and vastly prefer Java type syntax when working on larger projects. The forced organization tends to lead towards some level of mandatory code clarity. Something greatly lacking in Js land. OO is a bad word these days and functional is all the rage, even though functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering. There's a huge push to put more structured language concepts into js now that it's being used for substantial projects and it's out of necessity more than convenience. When I'm hacking together a quick Python script all that stuff gets in the way but when working on larger systems strong typing and object syntax are practically a neccesary evil for maintaining readability
  - bertrand-caron 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on how "functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering" ?
    - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
      Erlang and common lisp have been around for a long time, and functional programming is nothing new. The reality is that most business problems map conceptually to communication between objects, and that IDE's which greatly help developer productivity work a lot better with objects. Functional programming has origins in lambda calculus and academia because mathematical problems map more easily from pure math to functional programming. It's really popular in the circles where it's more useful/easier than OO. Honestly I don't think the people 20 years ago chose OO for most business languages over functional out of ignorance. They had a choice and decided that OO was better for business problem solving languages like Java even though a large majority of programmers from that era were math majors and familiar with functional syntax. I feel like we're in one of those cycles where a large number of a previous generation have retired and it's time to learn some of these lessons all over again. Notice how many wood commercial buildings have been going up in the last 15-20 years? A lot, and just long enough after everyone involved in all the great city fires of WW2 to be too dead to object.

kyrra 10y ago

Eh? Dart was trying to replace JavaScript in some fashion, but that obviously failed (they had good intentions, but bad execution). Seeing that Chrome hasn't included it yet, I doubt it will. So that dream is dead. Dart is a replacement for GWT at this point. See AdWords being written in dart now[0]. Though it's not clear now Flutter.io will play into all this (that's targeting mobile with no web target). As for typescript, Google actually embraced that fairly heavily with Angular2 being written in it. [0] http://news.dartlang.org/2016/03/the-new-adwords-ui-uses-dart-we-asked.html http://news.dartlang.org/2016/03/the-new-adwords-ui-uses-dar...

afsina 10y ago
AFAIK, Angular Dart is used heavily within Google. https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular

innocentoldguy 10y ago

JavaScript sucks because it has a weak standard library, ugly syntax, and its monopoly in web development has the industry stuck in a state of mediocrity, in my opinion. I have a VERY hard time believing that the apex of engineering intelligence and ingenuity is found in JavaScript. Also, as much as I love Elm, for instance, languages that transpile to JavaScript are just lipstick on a pig, and do little to solve the underlying problem. I'm not a fan of Dart either, but at least Google made an attempt to solve the JavaScript issue in the best way possible with Dart; by aiming to get rid of it.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
I agree with you that JavaScript sucks balls in far more ways than is reasonable for such a widely used language. The design is seriously shit when compared directly to really any popular language, even PHP. I disagree with transpilers not being a reasonable answer. Eventually JavaScript will be okay to work with, some day. Until then, transpilers offer nearly unlimited freedom in redesigning the bad parts of the language while maintaining 100% fowards and backwards compatibility. It's really as good as it can get. Since they compile down to a Turing complete language there's really no limit to the heaps of dog shit they can abstract away. Historically, c++ is nothing more than an insanely complicated C preprocessor and it has more than proven that such a strategy can be viable long term. In fact, the first c++ compiler made, cfront, is still available and literally outputs raw C code from c++. Typescript is easily my favorite since it's designed to compile down to very human friendly JS. Getting typescript out of your stack requires nothing more than one last compilation with optimizations turned off. Unlike most transpilers (looking at you babel) the output JavaScript uses standard JS workarounds like the crockerford privacy pattern for classes. This gives typescript fairly practical fowards and backwards compatibility. You can always target output to a newer version of js or convert your codebase out of typescript back to js at any time. If it catches enough traction, browsers will begin implementing native typescript parsing since it offers many potential performance optimizations on top of what js is capable of. At this point you just maintain your typescript codebase and use some library to give your legacy clients some transpiled J S on the fly. If typescript gets enough adoption it will fix JavaScript for good, in the same way the original c++ compiler (which just transformed to c) led to native support, so I'm really rooting for it.

isoos 10y ago

Looks like alternative facts have reached the tech world too? You can take as hard look at Google as you would like, but choosing Microsoft over Google (one for-profit company over another), while not caring how the technology, the licensing or the workflow compares is a bit hypocrite. (e.g.they are both open, and they both have rules of commits). I'm wondering, why do you need a throwaway for such heavily invested FUD? Your other comments here are in similar tone, and I'm surprised to see such hatred without any obvious trigger. Maybe if you would come forward with your story, it would be easier to discuss it? disclaimer: ex-Googler, worked with Dart for 4+ years, I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.

mememachine 10y ago
Associating your real name with a controversial opinion is basically just a bad idea.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  Exactly. Even if you're right it won't do you any good
throwawaydbfif 10y ago
Typescript and dart are completely different animals. I can leave typescript for good by compiling to js once and it's designed to output human readable code. The js it produces will be immediately usable as javascript, and I'm totally free from the semi open language that MS controls. Dart is a different language, it has no fallback to something familiar. I don't doubt that it's many years ahead of TS in every way but it's still rather proprietary compared to TS that I can shut off at any time with minimal effort. The openness of typescript and dart are comparable. Both being run primarily by their champion companies with code free to review and fork but with limited ability to commit changes. They both require you to sign over copyright of code committed which I don't like for my own reasons but the license is open source. The big difference to me is that typescript offers an escape hatch and dart does not, because one is pretty much a JavaScript enhancement and the other is completely different. I hate vendor lock-in and loss of the open web in general and you will see this as a common theme to most of my more flamey(controversial) comments. The web is closing off in so many directions and as an open source developer in my free time this is of great personal concern. I don't like that hackernews and reddit can be an echo chamber and posting contrary opinions usually makes the discussion more balanced even if a lot of people don't like it. I'm not ex google, MS, or any of the tech giants. I'm not smart or dedicated enough to work anywhere you've heard of :). Most of my comments on throwaway accounts are unpopular, that's why I don't use my normal account. I'm not some invisible super shill, hackernews knows all the accounts I use and I'm fine with that. I've just got my own opinions and when they're controversial it's not in my best interest to comment using my normal account. It wouldn't be for anyone. It would be utterly stupid to hurt my open source projects or reputation as a developer just because somebody doesn't like my opinions. My code and my work have no opinions, and I like to keep it that way. Throwaways are my way of keeping my opinions to myself, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Separation of church and state if you will. I'm not totally against Google or any company in general. Microsoft in particular has an extremely rocky history when it comes to open source projects. They've probably done more harm to Linux than any company in existence. If typescript and dart both had equal migration paths I would choose dart in a heartbeat. I love tsickle and the closure compiler and the fact that the angular team is using typescript. Still, I feel like my criticism of dart has some truth to it at least. I've taken aim at Google for the past week for what they've done to the openness of Android, AMP, and dart. Am I wrong? It's hard to argue that any of Google's platforms are as open as they were a few years ago. Some of my really unpopular opinions were posted in reponse to other poster calling me FUD or a shill, and can you blame me? It's one thing to say "I disagree and this is why" but pretty rude to just say "I don't believe you because you're obviously lying or getting paid to say that". To that I say well screw you I'll post what I want without being polite at all if you're going to be so rude. I'm replying nicely to you because you genuinely asked why I used a throwaway and said that you worked with dart at Google, way more than most would admit. Having an unpopular opinion just gets you labelled as a shill or FUD and that's a lot of the reason I use throwaways. I've actually gotten death threats before for disagreeing with people on the internet. It's hard to say I would be better off getting death threats from people that can easily find my name, occupation, and address. Look at more of my post history and you'll see that I'm probably not a shill, or a really sneaky one if you don't want to believe that. I just bashed Intel for removing ECC support from their desktop lines a few days ago, and Facebook and Microsoft a day before that for their shittastic timeline algorithm and irrational fear of Linux taking over corporate clients respectively. A day before that I trashed PayPal for some of their recent cronyism and praised the quality of Google's Guava libraries. In my more ancient post history I mention how much C#'s ecosystem sucks compared to java and how even open sourcing the language doesn't mean much when it only targets windows using visual studio. I bitched about the baby boomers screwing the mellenials and asked how it's possible to start a side business. I said I don't like Python because it's slow and gave people online marketing tips on how I write high ranking blog articles. I mentioned that .NET core sounds great but it's alpha quality and it sucks that I have to use the new version of Windows server to have http2 support. I talked about how WordPress is absolute shit for anything even medium traffic. Mentioned a quip about using monotonic grey codes. Brought up some arguments about montsanto and GM windblown crops. Mentioned that Uber doesn't give a fuck about their drivers and some examples of this despite their press releases saying otherwise. I'm getting a lot of comments about how I'm some full of shit corporate mouthpiece again so I guess it's time to cycle the old throwaway again. I'm not asking you to agree but keep in mind that some people will have opinions completely contrary to your own. Sometimes their reasoning will be logical even though you come to a different conclusion, people are just different

netheril96 10y ago

If Dart ever became the real thing, it must be supported in not just Google Chrome, but also Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc. At that point Google will lose its control.

afsina 10y ago
Google has decided not to put Dart VM in Chrome long ago. Of course Dart tools has very strong web development support and JS conversion.

mswift42 10y ago

Can you name one open source project, where I can commit a change the maintainer doesn't agree with?