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"First, the reverse-engineering costs of Dart are much higher than of XHR." Does this matter if it's open source? Not being combative, I'm actually asking. "I

"First, the reverse-engineering costs of Dart are much higher than of XHR." Does this matter if it's open source? Not being combative, I'm actually asking. "It seems to me that a lot of you 'bring on our new overlords' boosters" Well shit. I definitely don't want to be one of those!

BrendanEich 15y ago
Open source is usable only by some vendors. My Opera pals say they can use it (I'd heard differently from others at Opera in the past). Microsoft, I'm told, cannot -- they cannot even read open source. This is public knowledge, it came out, e.g., as part of the IronPython project. So Microsoft objected to WebSQL, since it depended on SQLite as source-code-is-specification. Writing a spec for SQLite or Dart is very hard. SQLite is >100KLOC in one .c file! Dart is at a guess bigger. Hence, reverse-engineering is required. Reading code at this scale doesn't tell you enough. Testing, with good coverage, is required. Then you have to separate the over-specification due to abstraction leaks and bugs, from the intentional specification. That's hard work too, and while source code comments may provide clues, the source itself does not say what's what. "Well shit. I definitely don't want to be one of those!" Sorry, I was not addressing you specifically, rather the (many, more than I expected) people here and elsewhere who are asking for the new and good monopoly to rewrite the web by itself with more awesome languages. The IE monopoly with ActiveX and all that was so long ago, the new generation did not live through it.
- ryanisinallofus 15y ago
  "The IE monopoly with ActiveX" I certainly remember and that's what your comment made me think of. It's not QUITE the same thing as it is supposed to compile to js but yeah, I get the comparison and would prefer to have no single-corporation overlords.

BrendanEich 15y ago

Open source is usable only by some vendors. My Opera pals say they can use it (I'd heard differently from others at Opera in the past). Microsoft, I'm told, cannot -- they cannot even read open source. This is public knowledge, it came out, e.g., as part of the IronPython project. So Microsoft objected to WebSQL, since it depended on SQLite as source-code-is-specification. Writing a spec for SQLite or Dart is very hard. SQLite is >100KLOC in one .c file! Dart is at a guess bigger. Hence, reverse-engineering is required. Reading code at this scale doesn't tell you enough. Testing, with good coverage, is required. Then you have to separate the over-specification due to abstraction leaks and bugs, from the intentional specification. That's hard work too, and while source code comments may provide clues, the source itself does not say what's what. "Well shit. I definitely don't want to be one of those!" Sorry, I was not addressing you specifically, rather the (many, more than I expected) people here and elsewhere who are asking for the new and good monopoly to rewrite the web by itself with more awesome languages. The IE monopoly with ActiveX and all that was so long ago, the new generation did not live through it.

ryanisinallofus 15y ago
"The IE monopoly with ActiveX" I certainly remember and that's what your comment made me think of. It's not QUITE the same thing as it is supposed to compile to js but yeah, I get the comparison and would prefer to have no single-corporation overlords.