3 ms·

We get this a lot. To the point that my colleague wrote this: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-

by filiph 8y ago

We get this a lot. To the point that my colleague wrote this: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf It's not easy to explain in a HN comment. Technical decisions like these never are. In this particular case, there is no single "Dart can do X and nothing else can". That's not true for any feature. It's the combination that mattered. All in all, Dart was a really, really, really good choice. Not from a marketing perspective, obviously, but that's not everything.

stewbrew 8y ago
So, the argument basically boils down to: It's a bad thing to use a dsl or similar only for gui. It's a good thing to use a whole new language you have to port all your code to and that has only a small ecosystem so you can also write all these libraries yourself. Don't get me wrong. Flutter may well be a formidable piece of software. Dart either. I just don't get how flutter is marketed around the fact that dart was there first with no convincing use case and that people only then started looking for a raison d'etre.
- sebe 8y ago
  Hey I've been following Dartlang's up and downs over the years, here are some ramblings about Flutter. When the chrome guys started the Sky experiment, now the flutter project, they started with javascript. I don't know why they dropped javascript, but they looked at several languages before trying Dart. Here is a floss weekly episode with one of the co-founders, talks about flutter's hotreload, an idea that came from the Dart team. https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s If swift was opensource back then they may have gone with it and if they started today they may have gone with kotlin native. Flutter's hotreload feature, something that they didn't know they wanted, was created after they decided to give Dart a go. While the Dart team had missed the boat on getting the Dart VM into chrome, they still had their internal customers using Dart2JS. The Dart team also had their own experiments in IOT and running on IOS. Maybe Sky/Flutter guys saw Dart solving their problems that Javascript couldn't and they also saw that the Dart team has the expertise to help them in advancing their experiment to where it is today.
  - stewbrew 8y ago
    Thanks for the background info. I was wrong then.

by filiph 8y ago

stewbrew 8y ago

So, the argument basically boils down to: It's a bad thing to use a dsl or similar only for gui. It's a good thing to use a whole new language you have to port all your code to and that has only a small ecosystem so you can also write all these libraries yourself. Don't get me wrong. Flutter may well be a formidable piece of software. Dart either. I just don't get how flutter is marketed around the fact that dart was there first with no convincing use case and that people only then started looking for a raison d'etre.

sebe 8y ago
Hey I've been following Dartlang's up and downs over the years, here are some ramblings about Flutter. When the chrome guys started the Sky experiment, now the flutter project, they started with javascript. I don't know why they dropped javascript, but they looked at several languages before trying Dart. Here is a floss weekly episode with one of the co-founders, talks about flutter's hotreload, an idea that came from the Dart team. https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s If swift was opensource back then they may have gone with it and if they started today they may have gone with kotlin native. Flutter's hotreload feature, something that they didn't know they wanted, was created after they decided to give Dart a go. While the Dart team had missed the boat on getting the Dart VM into chrome, they still had their internal customers using Dart2JS. The Dart team also had their own experiments in IOT and running on IOS. Maybe Sky/Flutter guys saw Dart solving their problems that Javascript couldn't and they also saw that the Dart team has the expertise to help them in advancing their experiment to where it is today.
- stewbrew 8y ago
  Thanks for the background info. I was wrong then.