3 ms·

> I'm not advocating using Dart in production then why anybody would want to use it? as much as i dislike MS , their TypeScript language makes more sense tha

by camus 13y ago

> I'm not advocating using Dart in production then why anybody would want to use it? as much as i dislike MS , their TypeScript language makes more sense than Dart which feels DOA already.

magicalist 13y ago
Well I don't see why my advocacy would be the dealbreaker either way :) Unless you mean if it's not to be used in production, then what's the point? It's a new language; that's how they work. I wouldn't recommend people use Rust in production yet either, but that says nothing about its future. I agree with you on Typescript, though I don't see it as any more interesting than Closure Compiler annotations plus one of the various ES6 transpilers. It's nice to have those in one package, but I don't really use or want the transpilers normally, so I feel no draw to them now. As for Dart, I've never totally understood its intended place and how it was expected to succeed there (though we'll see, I guess), but as for its use in practice, philosophically I now just think of it as another Coffeescript, and so I'm at peace with the idea that people want to use it.
- kihara 13y ago
  How can you compare a language that introduces a bunch of syntactic sugar over JavaScript semantics (CoffeeScript) with a language that brings a cleaned and streamlined semantics (Dart)?
  - magicalist 13y ago
    Only in the sense that I could have also compared it to any of the other languages that compile to Javascript. It was not meant as a commentary on the value of the language design. In fact, it was the opposite: Dart's mere existence doesn't mean I have to care about if people should be writing pure Javascript or worry about any potential Javascript existential crises Dart might raise. And that's great. It was a process to stop worrying and love the bomb -- so many HN articles proselytizing and condemning Coffeescript (and others) -- but I believe the healing started with the sheer popularity of Coffeescript, and then normalized when Brendan Eich stood on stage with Jeremy Ashkenas and told everyone that compiling to Javascript was A-OK in his book. So thinking of these languages in those terms is the reason I don't really care about the horse race and I'm ok with people writing in Dart if they want to. My domain will be fine, and might be improved as they find interesting things (syntax, developer tools, whatever) exploring a slightly different path toward a web scripting language. (though I'll continue to be annoyed if some article on web technology puts all its examples in X where X is not Javascript :)
- chrisbuc 13y ago
  Don't forget that Dart is not just a language, it's also a tool ecosystem, with a virtual machine that is already faster than V8 in some key benchmarks. This session from I/O by Kasper Lund and Lars Bak is well worth a watch: https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687 https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687 In it they explain that they've pretty much reached the peak of where they can get to in terms of performance with V8 (no more big jumps in performance), but by designing a language that is easier to optimize for, they've already made the Dart VM faster.

by camus 13y ago

> I'm not advocating using Dart in production then why anybody would want to use it? as much as i dislike MS , their TypeScript language makes more sense than Dart which feels DOA already.

magicalist 13y ago

Well I don't see why my advocacy would be the dealbreaker either way :) Unless you mean if it's not to be used in production, then what's the point? It's a new language; that's how they work. I wouldn't recommend people use Rust in production yet either, but that says nothing about its future. I agree with you on Typescript, though I don't see it as any more interesting than Closure Compiler annotations plus one of the various ES6 transpilers. It's nice to have those in one package, but I don't really use or want the transpilers normally, so I feel no draw to them now. As for Dart, I've never totally understood its intended place and how it was expected to succeed there (though we'll see, I guess), but as for its use in practice, philosophically I now just think of it as another Coffeescript, and so I'm at peace with the idea that people want to use it.

kihara 13y ago
How can you compare a language that introduces a bunch of syntactic sugar over JavaScript semantics (CoffeeScript) with a language that brings a cleaned and streamlined semantics (Dart)?
- magicalist 13y ago
  Only in the sense that I could have also compared it to any of the other languages that compile to Javascript. It was not meant as a commentary on the value of the language design. In fact, it was the opposite: Dart's mere existence doesn't mean I have to care about if people should be writing pure Javascript or worry about any potential Javascript existential crises Dart might raise. And that's great. It was a process to stop worrying and love the bomb -- so many HN articles proselytizing and condemning Coffeescript (and others) -- but I believe the healing started with the sheer popularity of Coffeescript, and then normalized when Brendan Eich stood on stage with Jeremy Ashkenas and told everyone that compiling to Javascript was A-OK in his book. So thinking of these languages in those terms is the reason I don't really care about the horse race and I'm ok with people writing in Dart if they want to. My domain will be fine, and might be improved as they find interesting things (syntax, developer tools, whatever) exploring a slightly different path toward a web scripting language. (though I'll continue to be annoyed if some article on web technology puts all its examples in X where X is not Javascript :)
chrisbuc 13y ago
Don't forget that Dart is not just a language, it's also a tool ecosystem, with a virtual machine that is already faster than V8 in some key benchmarks. This session from I/O by Kasper Lund and Lars Bak is well worth a watch: https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687 https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687 In it they explain that they've pretty much reached the peak of where they can get to in terms of performance with V8 (no more big jumps in performance), but by designing a language that is easier to optimize for, they've already made the Dart VM faster.