9 ms·

I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use <script type="text/d

by sbjs 8y ago

I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use <script type="text/dart"> instead of JavaScript. This had a lot of backlash from literally everyone, I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. Only after a few years the Dart team changed courses and said "never mind about that VM-inside-Chrome thing, we're just going to compile to JS like everyone else" but it was too late and nobody cared about Dart anymore and all the excitement and enthusiasm was gone. I think people don't realize just how much excitement and enthusiasm from a potential community makes or breaks a project when it's first announced.

pcwalton 8y ago
> I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. It's pretty simple, in my view: JS developers were happy with the language and didn't want a browser vendor trying to replace it. Remember that it was announced around the time that the new ES6 ("Harmony") features were generating a lot of excitement about the future of JS.
- sbjs 8y ago
  I think Dart started internal development around the same time CoffeeScript gained major popularity and brought attention to JS's desperate need to evolve, but they released at a bad time: when JS finally did start to evolve (as Harmony) which was a reaction to CoffeeScript in the first place. So CoffeeScript served its purpose of pushing JS forward, and most other compile-to-JS languages had no more purpose. I say most because some serve a different purpose than just being a slightly nicer JS, like how Elm piggy-backs on the familiarity of Haskell and provides a niche no-mutation environment, and TypeScript adds type-checking for those of us who can't write code as confidently without it. But the rest served their purpose, and Dart's dream of having its own VM inside Chrome was probably what killed it so quickly.
  - nailer 8y ago
    If Google had paved some cowpaths: - CoffeeScript was hugely popular at the time - it was even mandatory at GitHub to make new applications in CS not JS - Typescript was immediately well recieved. JS folk liked optional typing. - Ruby was popular amongst the web community Google would have done a lot better than making a new road and wondering why there's nobody on it.
    - munificent 8y ago
      > - CoffeeScript was hugely popular at the time - it was even mandatory at GitHub to make new applications in CS not JS We'd probably really be regretting that choice since CoffeeScript use is dwindling and the programmer ecosystem has generally turned towards static types. > - Typescript was immediately well recieved. JS folk liked optional typing. Dart was an optionally typed language and is actually older than TypeScript. But, the original creators were very focused on getting a native Dart VM in browsers and were willing to sacrifice seamless JS interop to get that. There's good arguments for that since great interop often means adding ugly features to your language in order to play nice with the existing one. Dart was intended to be a bigger leap forward from JS. If the VM wasn't part of the plan, then Dart probably would have hewed much closer to JS and been very similar to TypeScript. That probably would have been good for us then, but it might have been a limitation long-term. TypeScript is a really nice language, but it's got a lot of baggage that it inherits from JS. Dart is, I think, a much nicer language if you don't need to reuse and interop with a big corpus of existing JS code. > - Ruby was popular amongst the web community Is the "was" part of that intentional? I like Ruby a lot, but it's luster seems to have faded some in the past couple of years. I think what all of your points show is that if you pave cowpaths when doing language work, you end up optimizing for what users did several years ago. Languages take a long time to develop, so I think you have to aim for where you think users will be, otherwise you end up irrelevant by the time you launch.
      - billchristian 8y ago
        Lars (and company) approach to implement a Dart VM in Chrome was just ahead of its time. WASM is an attempt to accomplish a similar goal and implement a common VM. Perhaps, in the near future, Dart can be a syntax to compile to WASM and accomplish Lars' intentions.
- Joboman555 8y ago
  What I don’t understand is why people are excited about the new features of JavaScript. The problem with JavaScript has never been that it doesn’t have enough features or syntactic sugar. The problem with JavaScript is that it has a rotten, unsafe core. Its very nature is antithetical to writing robust software, yet we need it to create dynamic UI applications.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    > What I don’t understand is why people are excited about the new features of JavaScript. They're excited because new features are useful to lots of people.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    I’m not convinced Javascript boils down to anything worse than other dynamically-typed languages. Except it has features other langs don’t like async/await and async-everything. This is why many people including myself use Javascript even on the server. For example, I’d consider Python a downgrade. I point this out because it seems to be news to you that many people find Javascript pleasant and disdain for its “unsafe core”, whatever that means, extremely oversold.
munificent 8y ago
I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this. Personal opinion time: Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it. They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a delightful, productive, fast language. They intended to move the entire web forward the same way V8 had when it first launched, and they believed deeply that Dart would enable that. But I think they really underestimated how vastly different designing and marketing a language is from simply implementing an already-successful one. It's not enough to just have a good product. The way you present it is often more important. And you don't even have the luxury of defining "good product" — you must be mercenary in letting your users' needs override your personal preferences. All of that was a real struggle for them. For what it's worth, there's been a lot of staff changes over the years since Dart first launched. Lars and Kasper have left to try the startup thing again (which I think is a better fit for their skills and desires than evolving a big open source language). The team we have now, I believe, is much better aligned with what you're saying. It sucks that we do have this baggage, but I hope we can improve our reputation over time. I'm hopeful we can — it took Java several tries before it found its footing.
- kbd 8y ago
  I think a lot of what people found off-putting about Dart is that Google already recently came out with a new language that has become very successful. Announcing another one, which at first glance looks like yet another curly brace language not that far from Java, was a step too far for people to be interested. Nowadays, the only thing driving Dart seems to be Flutter, which again is head-scratching. Like, "Flutter sounds interesting but in addition to learning Flutter I need to learn a brand new programming language for it that's really only used for Flutter?" People only have so much bandwidth for new things and there's already so much to constantly learn in our industry.
  - munificent 8y ago
    I could be wrong, but I don't believe the existence of Go was much of a problem. Go and Dart are very different languages aimed for very different use cases. If anything, I think Go helped us because we could point to it as a successful language that Google hasn't cancelled. > not that far from Java This is something that hurt us, I think. You can write Dart code that looks a lot like Java, and many of our early public examples did. To make matters worse, for no good reason, Dart 1.0 didn't do any type inference, so even though you could use "var" for local variables, doing so would give you a worse user experience. But you don't have to write Java in Dart. You can write really elegant, clean code in Dart in a way that Java doesn't enable. You don't have to stuff everything inside classes. We've always had nice terse lambdas, higher-order functions, collection literals, etc. Here's a random little program of mine: import 'package:hauberk/src/engine.dart'; import 'package:hauberk/src/content.dart'; main() { var content = createContent(); var save = content.createHero("blah"); while (true) { var watch = Stopwatch(); watch.start(); // Generate a dungeon at each level. var count = 0; for (var i = 1; i <= Option.maxDepth; i++) { var game = Game(content, save, 1); for (var _ in game.generate()); // Read some bit of game data so the JIT doesn't optimize the whole // program away as dead code. if (game.hero.pos.x >= -1) count++; } watch.stop(); print("Generated $count dungeons in ${watch.elapsedMilliseconds}ms"); } } It's not the most beautiful code in the world, but I do think it's a good bit simpler and cleaner than it would be in Java.
macspoofing 8y ago
I agree. In addition because Dart shared some superficial similarities with Java, some people just assumed it's Java and criticized the language for it. For example Dart variable declaration is of the form "String a" vs "var s:string" - the former syntax looks like Java so Dart must be Java. It certainly felt like people were willing to 'pile-on' criticism because they felt that JS ecosystem was threatened. The language itself is very well designed and pleasurable to write code in.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I think your points about Dart being treated unfairly are legit. OTOH, Google certainly invited criticism - early Google efforts on the web were VERY "let's make JavaScript into Java", and as the JS community matured this attitude was viewed with less and less favor. I think it's notable that the community that DID end up having strong influence in the JS world (Node & npm) had much more of a Ruby background than Java. None of which invalidates Dart, but I know I was less than excited when Dart was announced as it seemed more Browser Wars crap rather than an improvement. Nowadays I'm more inclined to hold Google's history of not supporting products consistently (or at all, in most cases) against Dart than anything about the language specifically,
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    >early Google efforts on the web were VERY "let's make JavaScript into Java" That was never the case. Ever. Google was the first company to really take JavaScript seriously and launched the client-side JavaScript revolution with Maps and Gmail. This criticism was leveled at Dart because as I argued, when Dart was launched some people (purposely) found certain parts of the syntax superficially resembled Java. It was also a time when front-end web devs haven't rediscovered the benefits of compile-time type checking (there was a time, believe it or not, when static typing was disparaged by frontend web-devs) The irony is that Dart is a better language than JavaScript and the world would have benefitted had Dart become a browser standard (though Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla were never going to just accept a language designed by Google - so that was a pipe dream).
drb91 8y ago
> I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use <script type="text/dart"> instead of JavaScript. Funny, that's what I saw as the core attraction. The fact that they never pushed for adoption in other browsers and fell back on transpilation removed the benefit you'd get from an alternative scripting environment. Thankfully, we now have web assembly.
bradleyjg 8y ago
For me it was that google had burned all their credibility with me on GWT. I’m not taking any more career risks on their projects. Too much corporate ADD over there.

by sbjs 8y ago

pcwalton 8y ago

> I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. It's pretty simple, in my view: JS developers were happy with the language and didn't want a browser vendor trying to replace it. Remember that it was announced around the time that the new ES6 ("Harmony") features were generating a lot of excitement about the future of JS.

sbjs 8y ago
I think Dart started internal development around the same time CoffeeScript gained major popularity and brought attention to JS's desperate need to evolve, but they released at a bad time: when JS finally did start to evolve (as Harmony) which was a reaction to CoffeeScript in the first place. So CoffeeScript served its purpose of pushing JS forward, and most other compile-to-JS languages had no more purpose. I say most because some serve a different purpose than just being a slightly nicer JS, like how Elm piggy-backs on the familiarity of Haskell and provides a niche no-mutation environment, and TypeScript adds type-checking for those of us who can't write code as confidently without it. But the rest served their purpose, and Dart's dream of having its own VM inside Chrome was probably what killed it so quickly.
- nailer 8y ago
  If Google had paved some cowpaths: - CoffeeScript was hugely popular at the time - it was even mandatory at GitHub to make new applications in CS not JS - Typescript was immediately well recieved. JS folk liked optional typing. - Ruby was popular amongst the web community Google would have done a lot better than making a new road and wondering why there's nobody on it.
  - munificent 8y ago
    > - CoffeeScript was hugely popular at the time - it was even mandatory at GitHub to make new applications in CS not JS We'd probably really be regretting that choice since CoffeeScript use is dwindling and the programmer ecosystem has generally turned towards static types. > - Typescript was immediately well recieved. JS folk liked optional typing. Dart was an optionally typed language and is actually older than TypeScript. But, the original creators were very focused on getting a native Dart VM in browsers and were willing to sacrifice seamless JS interop to get that. There's good arguments for that since great interop often means adding ugly features to your language in order to play nice with the existing one. Dart was intended to be a bigger leap forward from JS. If the VM wasn't part of the plan, then Dart probably would have hewed much closer to JS and been very similar to TypeScript. That probably would have been good for us then, but it might have been a limitation long-term. TypeScript is a really nice language, but it's got a lot of baggage that it inherits from JS. Dart is, I think, a much nicer language if you don't need to reuse and interop with a big corpus of existing JS code. > - Ruby was popular amongst the web community Is the "was" part of that intentional? I like Ruby a lot, but it's luster seems to have faded some in the past couple of years. I think what all of your points show is that if you pave cowpaths when doing language work, you end up optimizing for what users did several years ago. Languages take a long time to develop, so I think you have to aim for where you think users will be, otherwise you end up irrelevant by the time you launch.
    - billchristian 8y ago
      Lars (and company) approach to implement a Dart VM in Chrome was just ahead of its time. WASM is an attempt to accomplish a similar goal and implement a common VM. Perhaps, in the near future, Dart can be a syntax to compile to WASM and accomplish Lars' intentions.
Joboman555 8y ago
What I don’t understand is why people are excited about the new features of JavaScript. The problem with JavaScript has never been that it doesn’t have enough features or syntactic sugar. The problem with JavaScript is that it has a rotten, unsafe core. Its very nature is antithetical to writing robust software, yet we need it to create dynamic UI applications.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  > What I don’t understand is why people are excited about the new features of JavaScript. They're excited because new features are useful to lots of people.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  I’m not convinced Javascript boils down to anything worse than other dynamically-typed languages. Except it has features other langs don’t like async/await and async-everything. This is why many people including myself use Javascript even on the server. For example, I’d consider Python a downgrade. I point this out because it seems to be news to you that many people find Javascript pleasant and disdain for its “unsafe core”, whatever that means, extremely oversold.

munificent 8y ago

I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this. Personal opinion time: Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it. They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a delightful, productive, fast language. They intended to move the entire web forward the same way V8 had when it first launched, and they believed deeply that Dart would enable that. But I think they really underestimated how vastly different designing and marketing a language is from simply implementing an already-successful one. It's not enough to just have a good product. The way you present it is often more important. And you don't even have the luxury of defining "good product" — you must be mercenary in letting your users' needs override your personal preferences. All of that was a real struggle for them. For what it's worth, there's been a lot of staff changes over the years since Dart first launched. Lars and Kasper have left to try the startup thing again (which I think is a better fit for their skills and desires than evolving a big open source language). The team we have now, I believe, is much better aligned with what you're saying. It sucks that we do have this baggage, but I hope we can improve our reputation over time. I'm hopeful we can — it took Java several tries before it found its footing.

kbd 8y ago
I think a lot of what people found off-putting about Dart is that Google already recently came out with a new language that has become very successful. Announcing another one, which at first glance looks like yet another curly brace language not that far from Java, was a step too far for people to be interested. Nowadays, the only thing driving Dart seems to be Flutter, which again is head-scratching. Like, "Flutter sounds interesting but in addition to learning Flutter I need to learn a brand new programming language for it that's really only used for Flutter?" People only have so much bandwidth for new things and there's already so much to constantly learn in our industry.
- munificent 8y ago
  I could be wrong, but I don't believe the existence of Go was much of a problem. Go and Dart are very different languages aimed for very different use cases. If anything, I think Go helped us because we could point to it as a successful language that Google hasn't cancelled. > not that far from Java This is something that hurt us, I think. You can write Dart code that looks a lot like Java, and many of our early public examples did. To make matters worse, for no good reason, Dart 1.0 didn't do any type inference, so even though you could use "var" for local variables, doing so would give you a worse user experience. But you don't have to write Java in Dart. You can write really elegant, clean code in Dart in a way that Java doesn't enable. You don't have to stuff everything inside classes. We've always had nice terse lambdas, higher-order functions, collection literals, etc. Here's a random little program of mine: import 'package:hauberk/src/engine.dart'; import 'package:hauberk/src/content.dart'; main() { var content = createContent(); var save = content.createHero("blah"); while (true) { var watch = Stopwatch(); watch.start(); // Generate a dungeon at each level. var count = 0; for (var i = 1; i <= Option.maxDepth; i++) { var game = Game(content, save, 1); for (var _ in game.generate()); // Read some bit of game data so the JIT doesn't optimize the whole // program away as dead code. if (game.hero.pos.x >= -1) count++; } watch.stop(); print("Generated $count dungeons in ${watch.elapsedMilliseconds}ms"); } } It's not the most beautiful code in the world, but I do think it's a good bit simpler and cleaner than it would be in Java.

macspoofing 8y ago

I agree. In addition because Dart shared some superficial similarities with Java, some people just assumed it's Java and criticized the language for it. For example Dart variable declaration is of the form "String a" vs "var s:string" - the former syntax looks like Java so Dart must be Java. It certainly felt like people were willing to 'pile-on' criticism because they felt that JS ecosystem was threatened. The language itself is very well designed and pleasurable to write code in.

ergothus 8y ago
I think your points about Dart being treated unfairly are legit. OTOH, Google certainly invited criticism - early Google efforts on the web were VERY "let's make JavaScript into Java", and as the JS community matured this attitude was viewed with less and less favor. I think it's notable that the community that DID end up having strong influence in the JS world (Node & npm) had much more of a Ruby background than Java. None of which invalidates Dart, but I know I was less than excited when Dart was announced as it seemed more Browser Wars crap rather than an improvement. Nowadays I'm more inclined to hold Google's history of not supporting products consistently (or at all, in most cases) against Dart than anything about the language specifically,
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >early Google efforts on the web were VERY "let's make JavaScript into Java" That was never the case. Ever. Google was the first company to really take JavaScript seriously and launched the client-side JavaScript revolution with Maps and Gmail. This criticism was leveled at Dart because as I argued, when Dart was launched some people (purposely) found certain parts of the syntax superficially resembled Java. It was also a time when front-end web devs haven't rediscovered the benefits of compile-time type checking (there was a time, believe it or not, when static typing was disparaged by frontend web-devs) The irony is that Dart is a better language than JavaScript and the world would have benefitted had Dart become a browser standard (though Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla were never going to just accept a language designed by Google - so that was a pipe dream).

drb91 8y ago

> I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use <script type="text/dart"> instead of JavaScript. Funny, that's what I saw as the core attraction. The fact that they never pushed for adoption in other browsers and fell back on transpilation removed the benefit you'd get from an alternative scripting environment. Thankfully, we now have web assembly.

bradleyjg 8y ago

For me it was that google had burned all their credibility with me on GWT. I’m not taking any more career risks on their projects. Too much corporate ADD over there.