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Perhaps there is some good reason for developing a whole new language. However my gut tells me that they should instead put their weight behind a new promising

by jsmcgd 15y ago

Perhaps there is some good reason for developing a whole new language. However my gut tells me that they should instead put their weight behind a new promising language that's still evolving.

wanorris 15y ago
I would say that it depends entirely on what aspect(s) of the problem of web programming Dart is trying to solve. It may be that the decision to make a new language stemmed from new ideas about type systems or new semantics that didn't really fit with any existing language. Obviously I'm speculating here, but since we don't know what Dart is, we're all speculating here.
- jsmcgd 15y ago
  Agreed :)
perfunctory 15y ago
For example?
- jsmcgd 15y ago
  I specifically didn't want to give an example. I thought it might appear that I was merely cheer-leading my language of choice and undermine the point I was making. However since you've asked I was thinking that perhaps something Javascript based, like Coffeescript or perhaps Clojure/Clojurescript or perhaps even Links http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/ http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/ There are probably another 100 reasonable candidates. I guess this leads me to the point I should have outright stated, that given that so many languages have already been written, it is highly likely that any new language will spend a lot of time covering ground that has already been covered by some other language. Surely it makes most sense to start off hunting through all these languages to find something that most closely matches what you need and continue from there. Who knows, perhaps that's exactly what they've done.
  - perfunctory 15y ago
    Well, the thing is that it's not necessarily easier to improve an existing language than to create a new one from scratch. There is a big advantage in starting all over - no backward compatibility headaches. Honestly I can't think of any existing language that's worth putting anyone's weight behind. Coffeescript - js has some horrible semantics and Coffeescript can't really hide all of them. Clojure - it's infinitely cool but it will never ever become the mainstream.

by jsmcgd 15y ago

Perhaps there is some good reason for developing a whole new language. However my gut tells me that they should instead put their weight behind a new promising language that's still evolving.

wanorris 15y ago

I would say that it depends entirely on what aspect(s) of the problem of web programming Dart is trying to solve. It may be that the decision to make a new language stemmed from new ideas about type systems or new semantics that didn't really fit with any existing language. Obviously I'm speculating here, but since we don't know what Dart is, we're all speculating here.

jsmcgd 15y ago
Agreed :)

perfunctory 15y ago

For example?

jsmcgd 15y ago
I specifically didn't want to give an example. I thought it might appear that I was merely cheer-leading my language of choice and undermine the point I was making. However since you've asked I was thinking that perhaps something Javascript based, like Coffeescript or perhaps Clojure/Clojurescript or perhaps even Links http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/ http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/ There are probably another 100 reasonable candidates. I guess this leads me to the point I should have outright stated, that given that so many languages have already been written, it is highly likely that any new language will spend a lot of time covering ground that has already been covered by some other language. Surely it makes most sense to start off hunting through all these languages to find something that most closely matches what you need and continue from there. Who knows, perhaps that's exactly what they've done.
- perfunctory 15y ago
  Well, the thing is that it's not necessarily easier to improve an existing language than to create a new one from scratch. There is a big advantage in starting all over - no backward compatibility headaches. Honestly I can't think of any existing language that's worth putting anyone's weight behind. Coffeescript - js has some horrible semantics and Coffeescript can't really hide all of them. Clojure - it's infinitely cool but it will never ever become the mainstream.