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I understand the context and still disagree. If Dart is so much better than JavaScript on Chrome and if its Dart->JS engine does a good enough job of creating

I understand the context and still disagree. If Dart is so much better than JavaScript on Chrome and if its Dart->JS engine does a good enough job of creating usable JS on other browsers that developers are willing to commit to using it to write apps then, well, that's too bad for everyone else, isn't it? Why should Google put the brakes on improving client side development just because it puts other browsers in the uncomfortable position of having to license Dart (for free, since it is OSS and has a liberal patent grant)? The same would be true if Microsoft created some sort of .NET->JS compiler with their own VM for IE, or if Mozilla did the same with some new language. As long as they bridge to JavaScript, more power to them. Client side web development could certainly use some of the tools that these different language environments could offer and if it kicks off another performance race to get browser-side languages even faster (especially on mobile devices), so much the better for everyone. I really don't see how there is any downside (to anyone but maybe Brendan Eich) to widespread usage of Dart unless the Dart->JS code proves to be suboptimal, but in that case devs won't use it.

thristian 15y ago
When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages they appeared on began to look much, much scrappier in Netscape than they did in Explorer. While most of them still worked, more or less, Explorer made a noticeable improvement. So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right? Find a web-developer who still has to work with IE6 and ask them what they think. Right now, Dart is freely-licensed and available to everybody, but who can contribute to it? Who will be allowed to veto compatibility-breaking changes? What happens if Apple announces some new hardware platform, and then Google coincidentally decides that supporting that platform in the Dart VM is no longer a priority, refuses to accept patches for it, and later refactorings happen to make it very difficult to maintain outside the official tree? What if the Dart VM becomes strategically important like Android, and current releases are only available to approved partners? Sure, it's very unlikely that all those things would happen, and fairly unlikely that even one of them would: up until now, Google has stuck pretty close to the "do no evil" thing. But if we stick with openly, collaboratively created technologies, those things are impossible, and "impossible" is better than "unlikely" in my book. If Dart were some kind of server-side thing Google wanted to use to increase the responsiveness of their sites, or something else internal to their systems, I wouldn't care — they're allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own servers. It's only because the value proposition of Dart is "give Google an inherent advantage of control over the Web, and in exchange you will get shiny things" that I'm concerned. There'll always be more shiny things, but (so far) there's only one Web.
- WayneDB 15y ago
  "So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right" Abso-friggin-lutely! You should be thanking Microsoft and Internet Explorer for upping everyone's game. They're the ones who introduced XmlHttpRequest. You knoww, "ajax"? It's their browser and they can do what they want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If everyone else likes it though, tough luck for you. Go build your own browser and language and drum up your own support for it. All of this political correctness is a bunch of bull.
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    Must some historical fact or pattern of facts be "all good" or "all bad"? Grow up! Microsoft added XHR to IE when they gave Java the boot in a spat with Sun, in order to keep Outlook Web Express in working order in IE. Was that "all good"? Clearly not for Sun or Java! The browser wars phase I had no winners. Yes, IE's DHTML innovations such as innerHTML were a win, and Netscape should have agreed to implement and standardize them. No, the long IE6 stagnation and legacy were Not Good.
    - WayneDB 15y ago
      Wow, really? Grow up? Nobody said it was all good for everyone. I made a counter-point that was clearly as balanced as the original point. Anyway, it really depends on your point of view. Personally I love the IE6 stagnation and other failures that affect the web such as the epic lameness of Javascript. Why? I think the whole platform sucks and I'm glad to see it fail and push people to build better solutions.
      - BrendanEich 15y ago
        "Abso-friggen-lutely" on top of "three cheers" lacks qualification about the thing you cheered being less than good for anyone. You were abso-friggen-lutist. Anyway, the open web standards are not failing. Dart is not a clearly better solution. I get your point about XHR, but do try to take mine about the whole history being a mixed bag, including what IE did. We can do better.
starwed 15y ago
The alternative to google developing Dart isn't doing nothing, but throwing more resources behind javascript. I think you are missing some of the context of Eich's comments. The very same leaked memo declared that Dart was developed b/c js could not be evolved into a suitable language. Obviously Eich thinks it can, but more to the point he's working on the committee that is responsible for guiding such evolution -- the same committee that google plays a major role in. So the particular claim he's laying out is this: Google throwing resources behind Dart is worse for the web than Google truly committing to an evolved javascript. You might agree or disagree with this claim, but your arguments so far have been tangential to it.
- cromwellian 15y ago
  If JS can be evolved, why has it taken over a decade, and still nothing much of substance? I think Javascript is much like Java, it is too hampered by concerns of remaining compatible with existing legacy semantics. Whenever you see a language where the only thing they can add is "syntactic sugar" it means they are unwilling to consider functionality that would break the underlying legacy VM assumptions, and that means, ultimately, their evolution is "boxed in" by these concerns. Java basically is at a dead end because changing the JVM is hard.
  - starwed 15y ago
    More than syntactic sugar is being added, for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_typed_arrays https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_typed_arrays
    - cromwellian 15y ago
      I'm super familiar with type arrays (I helped port GwtQuake which was one of the first apps to ever use them in large measure), but type arrays are an add-on API that doesn't change language semantics. Something that would change language semantics would be to offer early-bound namespaces. Early-binding would increase performance while simplifying VM implementation and make tooling easier.

thristian 15y ago

When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages they appeared on began to look much, much scrappier in Netscape than they did in Explorer. While most of them still worked, more or less, Explorer made a noticeable improvement. So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right? Find a web-developer who still has to work with IE6 and ask them what they think. Right now, Dart is freely-licensed and available to everybody, but who can contribute to it? Who will be allowed to veto compatibility-breaking changes? What happens if Apple announces some new hardware platform, and then Google coincidentally decides that supporting that platform in the Dart VM is no longer a priority, refuses to accept patches for it, and later refactorings happen to make it very difficult to maintain outside the official tree? What if the Dart VM becomes strategically important like Android, and current releases are only available to approved partners? Sure, it's very unlikely that all those things would happen, and fairly unlikely that even one of them would: up until now, Google has stuck pretty close to the "do no evil" thing. But if we stick with openly, collaboratively created technologies, those things are impossible, and "impossible" is better than "unlikely" in my book. If Dart were some kind of server-side thing Google wanted to use to increase the responsiveness of their sites, or something else internal to their systems, I wouldn't care — they're allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own servers. It's only because the value proposition of Dart is "give Google an inherent advantage of control over the Web, and in exchange you will get shiny things" that I'm concerned. There'll always be more shiny things, but (so far) there's only one Web.

WayneDB 15y ago
"So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right" Abso-friggin-lutely! You should be thanking Microsoft and Internet Explorer for upping everyone's game. They're the ones who introduced XmlHttpRequest. You knoww, "ajax"? It's their browser and they can do what they want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If everyone else likes it though, tough luck for you. Go build your own browser and language and drum up your own support for it. All of this political correctness is a bunch of bull.
- BrendanEich 15y ago
  Must some historical fact or pattern of facts be "all good" or "all bad"? Grow up! Microsoft added XHR to IE when they gave Java the boot in a spat with Sun, in order to keep Outlook Web Express in working order in IE. Was that "all good"? Clearly not for Sun or Java! The browser wars phase I had no winners. Yes, IE's DHTML innovations such as innerHTML were a win, and Netscape should have agreed to implement and standardize them. No, the long IE6 stagnation and legacy were Not Good.
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    Wow, really? Grow up? Nobody said it was all good for everyone. I made a counter-point that was clearly as balanced as the original point. Anyway, it really depends on your point of view. Personally I love the IE6 stagnation and other failures that affect the web such as the epic lameness of Javascript. Why? I think the whole platform sucks and I'm glad to see it fail and push people to build better solutions.
    - BrendanEich 15y ago
      "Abso-friggen-lutely" on top of "three cheers" lacks qualification about the thing you cheered being less than good for anyone. You were abso-friggen-lutist. Anyway, the open web standards are not failing. Dart is not a clearly better solution. I get your point about XHR, but do try to take mine about the whole history being a mixed bag, including what IE did. We can do better.

starwed 15y ago

The alternative to google developing Dart isn't doing nothing, but throwing more resources behind javascript. I think you are missing some of the context of Eich's comments. The very same leaked memo declared that Dart was developed b/c js could not be evolved into a suitable language. Obviously Eich thinks it can, but more to the point he's working on the committee that is responsible for guiding such evolution -- the same committee that google plays a major role in. So the particular claim he's laying out is this: Google throwing resources behind Dart is worse for the web than Google truly committing to an evolved javascript. You might agree or disagree with this claim, but your arguments so far have been tangential to it.

cromwellian 15y ago
If JS can be evolved, why has it taken over a decade, and still nothing much of substance? I think Javascript is much like Java, it is too hampered by concerns of remaining compatible with existing legacy semantics. Whenever you see a language where the only thing they can add is "syntactic sugar" it means they are unwilling to consider functionality that would break the underlying legacy VM assumptions, and that means, ultimately, their evolution is "boxed in" by these concerns. Java basically is at a dead end because changing the JVM is hard.
- starwed 15y ago
  More than syntactic sugar is being added, for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_typed_arrays https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript_typed_arrays
  - cromwellian 15y ago
    I'm super familiar with type arrays (I helped port GwtQuake which was one of the first apps to ever use them in large measure), but type arrays are an add-on API that doesn't change language semantics. Something that would change language semantics would be to offer early-bound namespaces. Early-binding would increase performance while simplifying VM implementation and make tooling easier.