7 ms·

Dart is part of Google's strategy to replace open-standards with its own proprietary walled-garden. Let's hope it doesn't work. Stay away from Dart.

by andyl 13y ago

cromwellian 13y ago
Stay away from Kool Aid. ;-) Really, this is unfounded and unjustified speculation.
- andybak 13y ago
  As silly as the preceding comment was. it's becoming common to hear similar sentiments and it just shows that Google has a severe PR problem amongst it's people who would previously have sung it's praises.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns) Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web. Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS. My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose. Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Hi Ray I respect your work a lot, but are you sure your view is not biased a bit by working for Google? It's sometimes hard to disconnect from that kind of working environment to see the kind of issues into the future certain practices can have. Dart turning into something bad for the web is really not all that unfounded or unjustified. You don't have to agree, but you shouldn't dismiss that argument so quickly. Dismissing this kind of thing is what leads to 'impossible' scenarios happening. The point needs to be raised, repeatedly, and hopefully within Google as well. As long as a possibility exists for Google to misuse Dart, there needs to be voices speaking out against that possible misuses before it occurs, not after.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    Dart is no more an attempt to replace the web with a walled garden than GWT is (which is what I work on). It is a tool, like Typescript, like CoffeeScript, like ClojureScript, like Emscripten. There's no "plan" to create a lock-in walled garden based around programming language. Google is interested in making the experience of developing web apps better, and making web apps more performant. They have many different strategies for this: Chrome DevTools, AngularJs, Web Components and other spec improvements, Dart, Closure Compiler, GWT, etc. The company does not make money from selling the Chrome browser, and unlike Microsoft, it doesn't make money from selling an OS. The incentives are not aligned like the way they were with IE and Windows. At the end of the day, Google makes money from people using the web. The real threat is from the Web falling too far behind Native. Also, the Web is far far bigger than the programming language Javascript. For the first 10+ years of the Web, people hardly even used JS except for form validation, and in general, on mobile, excessive amounts of JS lead to poor performance. There's still a ways to go on just HTML and CSS, and I'd frankly be more concerned about fragmentation in that area rather than fixation on Javascript. The way I see the potential of a DartVM is the same as OdinMonkey+asm.js. Dart compiles to JS, but DartVM will run it slightly faster, but it will always work on all browsers. Likewise, asm.js will work on all browsers, but will always run faster on OdinMonkey. Both Mozilla and Google have VMs that potentially bifurcate performance across browsers, but still produce outputs that can run (albeit slower) The concerns you should have about Google misusing Dart I think should really be about Google misusing market share. It's not really Dart per se that's the issue, it's the fact that if Chrome is the dominant browser, Google can drop anything they want into it, not just Dart, but any APIs they want.
mwcampbell 13y ago
Nonsense. Dart is open source, and it is designed to compile to efficient JavaScript that runs in all modern browsers. There is no walled-garden angle at all here.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  Open source doesn't mean anything if all the early design decisions were made in secret and ongoing design decisions are made by a single stakeholder. That is not how open web standards are built. Yes, you have the source code, so you can fork Dart if you want, I guess. How are you going to get your Dart fork into a browser?
  - parfe 13y ago
    You badly conflate open source and an open standards process.
    - kevingadd 13y ago
      I'm not conflating anything. You can't use 'Dart is open source' as a defense if people are complaining about walled gardens; it's entirely possible to have a walled garden around an open-source product.
  - ahoge 13y ago
    >if all the early design decisions were made in secret Sounds like any other language or any other piece of technology. No one starts with standards. This always happens some time after 1.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995 In June 1997, Ecma International published the first edition of the ECMA-262 specification. > you can fork Dart if you want You don't have to. The tools and the VM will continue to work. In the late 90s, I used a compiler from 1989. It still worked fine and it still works fine today (e.g. via DOSBox). I really don't know why everyone here seems to think that these kind of tools will self-destruct if left alone. They really don't do that. > How are you going to get your Dart fork into a browser? You don't have to. You can still compile to JavaScript. You can still use the VM on the server, for command line stuff, or on Android devices (there will be an ARM VM soon). It would be only a problem if you wouldn't be able to use browser with native Dart support for client-side web development, because compilation takes a few seconds and because you wouldn't be able to debug from within the IDE.
melling 13y ago
There should be some way to track people on HN for throwing around fud like this. It's pretty easy to put out a garbage statement then move on to the next thread. Somehow, driving posters to a higher standard in what they write.
- andyl 13y ago
  @melling - Stand up for Dart if you believe in it! Explain how a technology 100% designed and controlled by a single company is good for the open web. There's plenty of examples that show Google has a pattern of abandoning open-standards in favor of proprietary solutions. XMPP, WebKit, RSS: embrace, extend, kill. Now JavaScript is in the gunsights. Stay away from Dart.
  - melling 13y ago
    WebKit is Apple's baby. It'll survive and do well. Google diverging with their own product is not a problem. Can't speak to XMPP since I didn't follow that discussion. RSS is alive and well, however. All Google did was kill off their product. They didn't move to a different standard. I moved to the Digg Reader. Freedly is good too.
  - mayanksinghal 13y ago
    How did Google kill Webkit now? Google was among the top contributors to the project till not too long ago. It then forked its branch to Blink and Opera went with it. It is an open source project, that has contributors from many organizations. The proceedings are public on blink mailing list. The proposals, changes everything is there. RSS, by kill I assume you are hinting at how all the feeds were available through Google Takeout and Google Reader APIs that other SaaS applications used to very quickly get up to speed. And how it was recently reported (on Verge?) that these providers are doing great. Heck, I remember reading a Google blog post that even listed these alternatives. So as it was said elsewhere in this thread, stop spreading false information.
  - mda 13y ago
    Seems like whenever Dart is in HN, we hear a lot of FUD and slogans. Do you even know what Dart is?
copx 13y ago
JavaScript was originally as "open" as Dart. It was developed by Netscape and was only supported by their browser. It quickly became popular so Microsoft had to write their own implementation to stay competitive. Only after that JavaScript was standardized.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  I don't think anyone would advocate for repeating the history of JavaScript; everyone involved seems to agree that it turned out pretty poorly, and it took a huge amount of hard work to get to where we are now with ES5/ES6. It's true that Dart and JS are the same in this regard, but it's not 1995. If Dart was introduced in 1995, it'd certainly deserve to beat LiveScript and we'd probably be using it now.
  - ahoge 13y ago
    JavaScript turned out poorly because the first version was quickly thrown together (within 10 days, supposedly) by a single person. Furthermore, this person didn't care about tooling and he also didn't have any clue about optimizing virtual machines. Anyhow, any language or piece of technology needs to reach a certain state of maturity before it can be standardized. Once you standardized something, things are pretty much set in stone.
oscargrouch 13y ago
define "open-standards" vs. walled-garden? when a project is open source with a permissive license as dart is, how can it become a walled garden? walled garden to me is a closed platform, where nobody can change or see whats happening inside.. how that reality maps to dart? and people believe things like javascript are open standard, just because it have a commite? isnt that why javascript is stuck in the nineties and cant move forward?! Dart is a cool, modern and fast language designed from the ground up to give us a choice against the ugly javascript.. nobody really likes javascript, people just have to deal with it, because is there no option (until coffescript, dart, typescript and others came by) why is so bad to have options? and what could be the evil plan of google behind the creation of dart? there a lot of things i disagree the way google has being doing things.. but this technological fanatism will hurt us all.. Personally i dont care it came from google, or any other company.. actually from what i understand from the hystory of dart, it came from a V8 developer and its passion to make a better language that could be better for bigger projects and compile faster.. isnt cool that google believe in this project and put so many badass vm people behind it to make it work?! i just dont understand what could be bad in this sort of move.. its innovation, and its open.. its miles away from a walled garden.. and any browser or any application can adopt it and make it even more open and widespread adopted
jrockway 13y ago
Could you explain this strategy a bit more? It's not obvious to me how an open-sourcing a community-designed programming language is a step on the path to a "proprietary walled garden". Is your concern that Google's name behind it will give it more popularity than its design/implementation merit, and you'll have to use it instead of Javascript because employers/clients will demand it? The job market is much bigger than you are imagining: I'm sure someone out there will still pay you to write COBOL. So I wouldn't worry too much about this yet.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  What percentage of the code is contributed by non Google employees? How many non Google employees (give me a rough number) contributed to its initial design decisions in the first year it was in development? Let's compare those two numbers with Go.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    I'd be very interested in those numbers too. The current community seems pretty active, and Dart isn't even at 1.0 yet: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/misc https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...

Dart is part of Google's strategy to replace open-standards with its own proprietary walled-garden. Let's hope it doesn't work. Stay away from Dart.

by andyl 13y ago

Dart is part of Google's strategy to replace open-standards with its own proprietary walled-garden. Let's hope it doesn't work. Stay away from Dart.

cromwellian 13y ago

Stay away from Kool Aid. ;-) Really, this is unfounded and unjustified speculation.

andybak 13y ago
As silly as the preceding comment was. it's becoming common to hear similar sentiments and it just shows that Google has a severe PR problem amongst it's people who would previously have sung it's praises.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns) Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web. Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS. My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose. Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.
RyanZAG 13y ago
Hi Ray I respect your work a lot, but are you sure your view is not biased a bit by working for Google? It's sometimes hard to disconnect from that kind of working environment to see the kind of issues into the future certain practices can have. Dart turning into something bad for the web is really not all that unfounded or unjustified. You don't have to agree, but you shouldn't dismiss that argument so quickly. Dismissing this kind of thing is what leads to 'impossible' scenarios happening. The point needs to be raised, repeatedly, and hopefully within Google as well. As long as a possibility exists for Google to misuse Dart, there needs to be voices speaking out against that possible misuses before it occurs, not after.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Dart is no more an attempt to replace the web with a walled garden than GWT is (which is what I work on). It is a tool, like Typescript, like CoffeeScript, like ClojureScript, like Emscripten. There's no "plan" to create a lock-in walled garden based around programming language. Google is interested in making the experience of developing web apps better, and making web apps more performant. They have many different strategies for this: Chrome DevTools, AngularJs, Web Components and other spec improvements, Dart, Closure Compiler, GWT, etc. The company does not make money from selling the Chrome browser, and unlike Microsoft, it doesn't make money from selling an OS. The incentives are not aligned like the way they were with IE and Windows. At the end of the day, Google makes money from people using the web. The real threat is from the Web falling too far behind Native. Also, the Web is far far bigger than the programming language Javascript. For the first 10+ years of the Web, people hardly even used JS except for form validation, and in general, on mobile, excessive amounts of JS lead to poor performance. There's still a ways to go on just HTML and CSS, and I'd frankly be more concerned about fragmentation in that area rather than fixation on Javascript. The way I see the potential of a DartVM is the same as OdinMonkey+asm.js. Dart compiles to JS, but DartVM will run it slightly faster, but it will always work on all browsers. Likewise, asm.js will work on all browsers, but will always run faster on OdinMonkey. Both Mozilla and Google have VMs that potentially bifurcate performance across browsers, but still produce outputs that can run (albeit slower) The concerns you should have about Google misusing Dart I think should really be about Google misusing market share. It's not really Dart per se that's the issue, it's the fact that if Chrome is the dominant browser, Google can drop anything they want into it, not just Dart, but any APIs they want.

mwcampbell 13y ago

Nonsense. Dart is open source, and it is designed to compile to efficient JavaScript that runs in all modern browsers. There is no walled-garden angle at all here.

kevingadd 13y ago
Open source doesn't mean anything if all the early design decisions were made in secret and ongoing design decisions are made by a single stakeholder. That is not how open web standards are built. Yes, you have the source code, so you can fork Dart if you want, I guess. How are you going to get your Dart fork into a browser?
- parfe 13y ago
  You badly conflate open source and an open standards process.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    I'm not conflating anything. You can't use 'Dart is open source' as a defense if people are complaining about walled gardens; it's entirely possible to have a walled garden around an open-source product.
- ahoge 13y ago
  >if all the early design decisions were made in secret Sounds like any other language or any other piece of technology. No one starts with standards. This always happens some time after 1.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995 In June 1997, Ecma International published the first edition of the ECMA-262 specification. > you can fork Dart if you want You don't have to. The tools and the VM will continue to work. In the late 90s, I used a compiler from 1989. It still worked fine and it still works fine today (e.g. via DOSBox). I really don't know why everyone here seems to think that these kind of tools will self-destruct if left alone. They really don't do that. > How are you going to get your Dart fork into a browser? You don't have to. You can still compile to JavaScript. You can still use the VM on the server, for command line stuff, or on Android devices (there will be an ARM VM soon). It would be only a problem if you wouldn't be able to use browser with native Dart support for client-side web development, because compilation takes a few seconds and because you wouldn't be able to debug from within the IDE.

melling 13y ago

There should be some way to track people on HN for throwing around fud like this. It's pretty easy to put out a garbage statement then move on to the next thread. Somehow, driving posters to a higher standard in what they write.

andyl 13y ago
@melling - Stand up for Dart if you believe in it! Explain how a technology 100% designed and controlled by a single company is good for the open web. There's plenty of examples that show Google has a pattern of abandoning open-standards in favor of proprietary solutions. XMPP, WebKit, RSS: embrace, extend, kill. Now JavaScript is in the gunsights. Stay away from Dart.
- melling 13y ago
  WebKit is Apple's baby. It'll survive and do well. Google diverging with their own product is not a problem. Can't speak to XMPP since I didn't follow that discussion. RSS is alive and well, however. All Google did was kill off their product. They didn't move to a different standard. I moved to the Digg Reader. Freedly is good too.
- mayanksinghal 13y ago
  How did Google kill Webkit now? Google was among the top contributors to the project till not too long ago. It then forked its branch to Blink and Opera went with it. It is an open source project, that has contributors from many organizations. The proceedings are public on blink mailing list. The proposals, changes everything is there. RSS, by kill I assume you are hinting at how all the feeds were available through Google Takeout and Google Reader APIs that other SaaS applications used to very quickly get up to speed. And how it was recently reported (on Verge?) that these providers are doing great. Heck, I remember reading a Google blog post that even listed these alternatives. So as it was said elsewhere in this thread, stop spreading false information.
- mda 13y ago
  Seems like whenever Dart is in HN, we hear a lot of FUD and slogans. Do you even know what Dart is?

copx 13y ago

JavaScript was originally as "open" as Dart. It was developed by Netscape and was only supported by their browser. It quickly became popular so Microsoft had to write their own implementation to stay competitive. Only after that JavaScript was standardized.

kevingadd 13y ago
I don't think anyone would advocate for repeating the history of JavaScript; everyone involved seems to agree that it turned out pretty poorly, and it took a huge amount of hard work to get to where we are now with ES5/ES6. It's true that Dart and JS are the same in this regard, but it's not 1995. If Dart was introduced in 1995, it'd certainly deserve to beat LiveScript and we'd probably be using it now.
- ahoge 13y ago
  JavaScript turned out poorly because the first version was quickly thrown together (within 10 days, supposedly) by a single person. Furthermore, this person didn't care about tooling and he also didn't have any clue about optimizing virtual machines. Anyhow, any language or piece of technology needs to reach a certain state of maturity before it can be standardized. Once you standardized something, things are pretty much set in stone.

oscargrouch 13y ago

define "open-standards" vs. walled-garden? when a project is open source with a permissive license as dart is, how can it become a walled garden? walled garden to me is a closed platform, where nobody can change or see whats happening inside.. how that reality maps to dart? and people believe things like javascript are open standard, just because it have a commite? isnt that why javascript is stuck in the nineties and cant move forward?! Dart is a cool, modern and fast language designed from the ground up to give us a choice against the ugly javascript.. nobody really likes javascript, people just have to deal with it, because is there no option (until coffescript, dart, typescript and others came by) why is so bad to have options? and what could be the evil plan of google behind the creation of dart? there a lot of things i disagree the way google has being doing things.. but this technological fanatism will hurt us all.. Personally i dont care it came from google, or any other company.. actually from what i understand from the hystory of dart, it came from a V8 developer and its passion to make a better language that could be better for bigger projects and compile faster.. isnt cool that google believe in this project and put so many badass vm people behind it to make it work?! i just dont understand what could be bad in this sort of move.. its innovation, and its open.. its miles away from a walled garden.. and any browser or any application can adopt it and make it even more open and widespread adopted

jrockway 13y ago

Could you explain this strategy a bit more? It's not obvious to me how an open-sourcing a community-designed programming language is a step on the path to a "proprietary walled garden". Is your concern that Google's name behind it will give it more popularity than its design/implementation merit, and you'll have to use it instead of Javascript because employers/clients will demand it? The job market is much bigger than you are imagining: I'm sure someone out there will still pay you to write COBOL. So I wouldn't worry too much about this yet.

MatthewPhillips 13y ago
What percentage of the code is contributed by non Google employees? How many non Google employees (give me a rough number) contributed to its initial design decisions in the first year it was in development? Let's compare those two numbers with Go.
- jrockway 13y ago
  I'd be very interested in those numbers too. The current community seems pretty active, and Dart isn't even at 1.0 yet: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/misc https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...