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The author seems to basically be describing Dart 1, which wasn't actually all that successful. It was a dynamic language with optional typing and it excluded so

by hencq 5y ago

The author seems to basically be describing Dart 1, which wasn't actually all that successful. It was a dynamic language with optional typing and it excluded some of the hard to optimize parts of e.g. Ruby, JavaScript or Python. Whether it wasn't successful because of technical reasons or other reasons is perhaps hard to untangle, but the philosophy seemed very close to what this post argues for. Dart moved away from that though and went for static and sound typing instead with Dart 2 and seems to have carved out more of a niche that way.

wstrange 5y ago
The type inference of Dart 2 pretty much gets out of your way. Dart is very much a joy to use. For scripting, a shout out to Dart CLI: https://pub.dev/packages/dcli https://pub.dev/packages/dcli
brabel 5y ago
Another language that comes to mind is Groovy. Types are optional, but when used, they are checked at runtime, or compile time with `@TypeChecked` or `@CompileStatic`.
- gregopet 5y ago
  Groovy is absolutely phenomenal for scripting. Optionally typed, has the entire Java ecosystem of libraries available (with no extra download or build files neccessary), very good IDE support, mature, extremely rich common library, great performance. I've built entire prototypes in Groovy at amazing speeds and then gradually replaced individual files with Java/Kotlin code and made sure the entire thing still worked. When I had grabbed everything of value I copied the resulting Java/Kotlin files to the real codebase and deleted the prototype. I could've left them in Groovy, too, as it is quite performant enough, alas customers preferred Java/Kotlin.
axegon_ 5y ago
It truly baffles me why Dart never picked up(ignoring flutter since it's in it's core). It is magnitudes better thought out than js, it is consistent and it comes with a ton of features baked into it by design(package management, statically typed, null safety, built-in linter and so on, all of which are available but as afterthoughts in js).
- IshKebab 5y ago
  The main issue was that it was seen as Google pushing a language that people would have to support forever that wasn't really that much better than JavaScript. That argument turned out to be more or less nonsense - if supporting language features forever is really an issue why have so many features been added to JavaScript? But even so I think it was probably a good thing it didn't become a web standard because Dart has become way way better than it ever could have been had it been standardised. Modern Dart is great. The problem now is that so is modern Typescript. Especially if you use it via Deno - in a lot of ways it is better than Dart. I really like Dart and I wish it was more popular but I think it's too late for it to have any hope of beating Typescript.

by hencq 5y ago

wstrange 5y ago

The type inference of Dart 2 pretty much gets out of your way. Dart is very much a joy to use. For scripting, a shout out to Dart CLI: https://pub.dev/packages/dcli https://pub.dev/packages/dcli

brabel 5y ago

Another language that comes to mind is Groovy. Types are optional, but when used, they are checked at runtime, or compile time with `@TypeChecked` or `@CompileStatic`.

gregopet 5y ago
Groovy is absolutely phenomenal for scripting. Optionally typed, has the entire Java ecosystem of libraries available (with no extra download or build files neccessary), very good IDE support, mature, extremely rich common library, great performance. I've built entire prototypes in Groovy at amazing speeds and then gradually replaced individual files with Java/Kotlin code and made sure the entire thing still worked. When I had grabbed everything of value I copied the resulting Java/Kotlin files to the real codebase and deleted the prototype. I could've left them in Groovy, too, as it is quite performant enough, alas customers preferred Java/Kotlin.

axegon_ 5y ago

It truly baffles me why Dart never picked up(ignoring flutter since it's in it's core). It is magnitudes better thought out than js, it is consistent and it comes with a ton of features baked into it by design(package management, statically typed, null safety, built-in linter and so on, all of which are available but as afterthoughts in js).

IshKebab 5y ago
The main issue was that it was seen as Google pushing a language that people would have to support forever that wasn't really that much better than JavaScript. That argument turned out to be more or less nonsense - if supporting language features forever is really an issue why have so many features been added to JavaScript? But even so I think it was probably a good thing it didn't become a web standard because Dart has become way way better than it ever could have been had it been standardised. Modern Dart is great. The problem now is that so is modern Typescript. Especially if you use it via Deno - in a lot of ways it is better than Dart. I really like Dart and I wish it was more popular but I think it's too late for it to have any hope of beating Typescript.