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I am mostly a Java developer. I guess I could write syntactically correct JavaScript but it's a bit alien to me. As is the whole tooling landscape of JavaScript

I am mostly a Java developer. I guess I could write syntactically correct JavaScript but it's a bit alien to me. As is the whole tooling landscape of JavaScript (Grunt, Node, Angular, Backbone, etc.). I'd like to do a few personal projects with server-side scripting and I need to learn a new language and ecosystem for it. From what I've seen I'd rather learn Dart because it is more familiar to me. What's been stopping me from doing that is missing integration and/or documentation in asset compilation toolchains for example in Play (i.e. no sbt-web plugin).

WoodenChair 12y ago
Dart is often found to be very familiar by Java developers. In fact, on the mailing list, it is sometimes criticized for being too Java like. Java developers who feel disaffected by JavaScript are certainly a large niche that Dart appeals to.
javajosh 12y ago
You might try Adobe's editor, Brackets. It does a very good job at psudeo-intellisense, can even infer argument types, and has lots of nice plugins for working with JavaScript - including features that let you see the body of a function under the cursor, or the JSDoc (the equiv of JavaDoc). There is a JSHint plugin (linting is the closest JS gets to compilation). And of course the Theseus debugger, which is quite good. I think its neat that the editor is built on browser tech (Github's Atom is built like that, too). Client side development is, ironically, somewhat more complex because of the lack of module standard. You'll almost certainly want to use require() in the browser, but that won't work without taking extra, confusing steps. 'Browserify' pre-processes your JavaScript, generating a single large bundle, but that introduces complexity both at build- and run-time. And that doesn't even address the ongoing saga of the lack of a module standard for the browser. By contrast, writing simple programs or servers in Node is vastly more enjoyable than in Java.

WoodenChair 12y ago

Dart is often found to be very familiar by Java developers. In fact, on the mailing list, it is sometimes criticized for being too Java like. Java developers who feel disaffected by JavaScript are certainly a large niche that Dart appeals to.

javajosh 12y ago

You might try Adobe's editor, Brackets. It does a very good job at psudeo-intellisense, can even infer argument types, and has lots of nice plugins for working with JavaScript - including features that let you see the body of a function under the cursor, or the JSDoc (the equiv of JavaDoc). There is a JSHint plugin (linting is the closest JS gets to compilation). And of course the Theseus debugger, which is quite good. I think its neat that the editor is built on browser tech (Github's Atom is built like that, too). Client side development is, ironically, somewhat more complex because of the lack of module standard. You'll almost certainly want to use require() in the browser, but that won't work without taking extra, confusing steps. 'Browserify' pre-processes your JavaScript, generating a single large bundle, but that introduces complexity both at build- and run-time. And that doesn't even address the ongoing saga of the lack of a module standard for the browser. By contrast, writing simple programs or servers in Node is vastly more enjoyable than in Java.