From Bracha's talk, it's clear that they're designing Dart not for themselves but for what their imaginary average web programmer (who sounds like quite a dull

From Bracha's talk, it's clear that they're designing Dart not for themselves but for what their imaginary average web programmer (who sounds like quite a dull creature) will tolerate. That's why Dart is so Java-like, for example. Isn't that a well-known path to mediocrity? Even Bracha doesn't seem to like Dart very much - he just really hates Javascript. I wish they had instead taken on the task of producing the greatest and most inspiring (to themselves) web language they possibly could. Perhaps part of the problem, though, is that they are language designers and implementors who don't actually write web programs themselves. Of course, Java was designed in such a way and became widespread if not beloved. But then it too won what Bracha (in pooh-poohing Javascript's success) calls a "language lottery", meaning it benefitted from an accident of timing. Barring that happening for Dart, it seems unlikely that lots of smart programmers will get very excited about it. One interesting point in Bracha's talk: he mentions the Dart VM more as a server-side platform - basically an alternative to Node.js - than as something they would ship to the client in Chrome. The client-side story, at least for now, is that Dart always compiles to JS. And he claims that they've already got compiled Dart to be about as fast as handwritten JS, which is surprising.