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Google Dart Will Not Be the Next Default Programming Language of the Web

40 points by stesch 11y ago

digitalzombie 11y ago
Yeah, a few weeks old news. But yeah, their new frontend rendering 2.0 is in type script (brainfart can't remember name). Update: angularjs 2.0 In general I think Google should work with other browser such as Mozilla and Microsoft if they want a default language. I think Mozilla is firmly with Javascript seeing how they have Brendan Eich (creator of javascript). I'm also hoping there is a good alternative to javascript supported out of the box from other browsers. No transpiler. Don't get me wrong, I've invested a lot in learning Javascript but I really dislike it when you're writing tons of lines of code. Reason being it's loosely type and dynamic. edit: The reason for me thinking Mozilla sticking to javascript. They have lots of project in javascript, PDF renderer, etc.. They also have already allocating resources into Rust. And for a while now Microsoft and Google have offer their take on an alternative javascript (type script & dart). I don't recall Mozilla offering any alternative to javascript.
- woah 11y ago
  Typescript is JavaScript with some minimal annotations.
  - karmakaze 11y ago
    I'm all in favour of TypeScript instead of JS. Unlike CoffeeScript (despite their 'it's just javascript') it is a superset so you can just rename .js .ts. So really TS: 'It's just JavaScript'.. but improved.
    - estava 11y ago
      Yes, TS is improved since it comes with the top IDE: VS. :-P Seriously though. Watching how people use IDE to code on Twitch can be so boring. Everyone is quick to suggest to step the code with the debugger. When just printing stuff to the console would be better. I hope that TypeScript never makes it into the browsers. I would take JavaScript without the types by default. It can even be more static than it is. But please, no types by default. Types make for bloated code. Someone yesterday spent 2 hours on Twitch dabbling with the Eclipse IDE and could not get unstuck, since they weren't even referring to the documentations or making quick changes to test their code.
      - _random_ 11y ago
        "Types make for bloated code" - no, poor type inference does.
        estava 11y ago
        In theory. In practice many of the mainstream languages make for bloated code. Yesterday I was seeing type casts and so on increasing the size of the code. But developers can grow used to bloated code. Like they can get used to stepping the code with the debugger. I for one prefer to print debug info. On the browser I have custom code that helps with that. But I understand that many developers don't have anything like that and they have to use a standard debugger instead. I grew used to debugging with print outs on Ruby. Before that I used to use IDEs like Delphi and Eclipse. I also hear that one of the problems people may have on OCaml is that sometimes when they want to print some data structures they first have to make it printable. I like languages that make the structures printable by default like in Ruby. Anyways...
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > I think Mozilla is firmly with Javascript seeing how they have Brendan Eich (creator of javascript). had.
- underwater 11y ago
  Brendan Eich left Mozilla a while back. It sounds like you want Typescript and Flow. And they already exists. We shouldn't add another high level language in the browser. Developers are happy enough transpiling code and coupling language features to browser upgrade cycles doesn't make sense.
  - _random_ 11y ago
    "...Developers are happy enough transpiling code..." - happy the way disaster survivors are happy to live in makeshift sheds rather than, you know, being dead. And the number of shed designs on offer doesn't matter.
- lindig 11y ago
  Google works on SoundScript [https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments]: graudual but sound typing for JavaScript with the goal to allow for more aggressive optimisation in the VM.
- wwweston 11y ago
  > I don't recall Mozilla offering any alternative to javascript. Mozilla is offering two alternatives to what most people probably mean by "JavaScript" (ECMAScript 3 or 5): 1) A better JavaScript, where more of missing things people complain about are present and most of the present things people complain about have options they're less likely to complain about (though a certain famous quote by Stroustrup comes to mind). 2) JavaScript as a well-performing target, something for people whose reasons for complaining are either subjective or simply unaddressable to go to without deeply fragmenting the browser-as-runtime.
jasonm23 11y ago
Even within google, Dart is only used in the Dart team... This is old news.
- EugeneOZ 11y ago
  Try to read article before commenting. Most important project of Google now using Dart for client-side. Dart tools are really great - they invested in IDE support, debugging tools, and it's a real pleasure to work with Dart. Only thing which stops me for using Dart on server-side is dynamic nature of language - I fed up by dynamic brittleness in PHP. But it's just me, and I'm sure there are billions of people who love dynamic languages. I'll try to use Dart for client-side code, when ng2 will be more ready for experiments (routing, http, forms). As PHP and Golang shows, solid (reach) std lib and good documentation are keys for fast and wide adoption, so I hope Dart team will also invest in std lib expanding and more human-friendly documentation. I wish them luck.
- cbracken 11y ago
  If you actually work at Google I would encourage you to do a search of the codebase for files named .*\.dart and you'll spot a broad cross-section of Google, from Google Fiber (set top box and the customer portal), to AdSense and AdWords, to Election Maps, to folks in Geo are using Dart for their front-ends.
lostit2xx 11y ago
It doesn't matter. Javascript is the default and what Google does with Dart does not matter unless everyone else is on board. This is a dumb, clickbait title. http://developers.whatwg.org/scripting-1.html#scriptingLanguages http://developers.whatwg.org/scripting-1.html#scriptingLangu...
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I have experimented a lot with Dart, both client and server side. I nice language and ecosystem. Smart move concentrating on compilation to JavaScript. Clojurescript has been my favorite client side language for a while, but I am considering jumping to Typescript - a really well designed and implemented language. It really doesn't seem to matter which language one writes in that can be transpiled to JavaScript. Pick one you like or just use plain JavaScript. This seems to be one of those cases where you can just pick what you like - a different situation than choosing between Java or C# or Haskell, etc.
- kingmanaz 11y ago
  >It really doesn't seem to matter which language one writes in that can be transpiled to JavaScript. Pick one you like or just use plain JavaScript. This seems to be one of those cases where you can just pick what you like - a different situation than choosing between Java or C# or Haskell, etc. Google should redirect the Dart project's resources toward the creation of a legibly-errored, fast, golang to js transpiler. The open source community has already performed the heavy lifting with the gopherjs project. Google should get on board and support its own language in browser space. A project like gopherjs would take off with the weight of Google behind it: all it needs are increased examples, tutorials, and publicity.
  - tkubacki 11y ago
    Dart was designed to be be easy transpiled to JS. It's not possibile with Golang by design AFAIK. Also golang is not 'C-like' syntax lang so I doubt it would get any traction among mainstream devs (java,c,c#,js). Following your logic, one could argue that Google should drop Go and use only Dart since it's client and server since day 1. Both positions are silly IMHO.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Since I know it'll come up: no, we don't need a web bytecode. We already have JavaScript. Any new "web bytecode" would be unnecessarily reinventing the wheel, and lack most of JS's advantages. JS is a great compiler target. In fact, modern JS even includes features to make it more optimal for this (new Math functions, for instance).
- hetman 11y ago
  The problem with JavaScript is that it has a complex grammar which means startup times can suffer. Beyond that it does a pretty good job of substituting for a real bytecode (though it requires a bit of hoop jumping).
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  For the record, I did not downvote you (I actually upvoted you, since I think your comment contributes to the discussion, even though I disagree with it). > JS is a great compiler target. The only thing that makes Javascript an attractive compilation target is its ubiquity. The importance of ubiquity should not be discounted. Many languages have succeeded in their target markets on this basis alone, and Javascript may certainly be one of them! But let's not forget that, in almost every other way, it falls short of ideal. Some examples: * Very difficult to parse (while not strictly necessary for a compilation target, still very helpful) * Esoteric type conversion system (leads to bugs) * Lack of integral type (this can be worked around, but the fact that it needs to be worked around makes it a bad target). * Highly dynamic type system (makes it difficult to optimize code, and a good compilation target should be easy to optimize) * Paucity of parsers (I may be wrong, but to my knowledge, there are very few parsers that are neither (A) written in Javascript, or (B) developed as part of a browser rendering engine[0]. If I remember correctly, Facebook's Flow is one of the rare counterexamples[1].) * Single-threaded runtime (makes it challenging to implement languages that explicitly allow parallel execution as part of their semantics) There are ways to address each of these. For example, asm.js limits the scope of the language with the goal of increasing performance of a subset of the language. But they're still shortcomings that have to be dealt with in the first place. Not that any compilation target is perfect in all of the above ways, but Javascript's combination of all of these makes it a very frustrating choice. [0] For example, V8 and Spidermonkey were both originally motivated by Firefox and Chrome. The fact that so few people attempt to write their own (except in Javascript), even for fun/experimentation, should give a very rough indication of how challenging it is. [1] Someone may be able to provide clarity on this: I know Flow is written in OCaml, and I know that at least some of the parsing happens in OCaml, but I also know that Spidermonkey is involved somehow. Is it just that the AST produced is identical to the Spidermonkey AST, or does it actually use Spidermonkey itself at some part of the parsing process?
jayvanguard 11y ago
It was never going to be. Any language claiming to be the new web language needs to convince Google, Apple, and Microsoft to all cooperate and put it in their browsers. So any language created by just one of the three of them is dead in the water.
- frik 11y ago
  > So any language created by just one of the three of them is dead in the water. Have a look how Microsoft influenced JavaScript/ECMAScript 6+ with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. MS shaped ES6 how they wanted, Trojan horse or "Elop" style. Not at all surprising given the companies long extensive history (IBM, DOS, OS/2, Novell, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, Nokia). JavaScript was always a prototype inheritance based language, with ES6 it got the "class" keyword (syntactic sugar) from class inheritance based language (Java or the inspired C# from Hejlsberg): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototypal_inheritance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototypal_inheritance , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop (Ex-MS, Ex-Nokia, MS Trojan horse) JavaScript5 is a lean and nice language if one adheres to the "Good Parts" of Douglas Crockford. Some of the ES6/7 concepts were influenced and are in the wrong direction IMHO.
  - aikah 11y ago
    > Have a look how Microsoft influenced JavaScript/ECMAScript 6+ with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. To say that Typescript influenced Javascript in anyway in revisionism(i.e. a blatant LIE) ES6 had classes way before Typescript. Furthermore, ES6 classes and Typescript classes are different. Typescript didn't influence ES6 at all. Most ES6 influences comes from Coffeescript and Python. Finally you're forgetting all the ES4 fiasco (basically JS looking like ActionScript3) where Microsoft said a BIG NO. So please explain us where you got the idea that Typescript influenced or is influencing ES6. Even if you consider annotations, Traceur(Google) had them before they were implemented by Yehuda in Typescript.
tkubacki 11y ago
snarky comments shows that we can't have fully open source and much better lang than JS (perf, sdk, lexical this, tooling, IDE) replacing JS because of...google ressentiment
- shockzzz 11y ago
  what?
frik 11y ago
Notch, the Minecraft creator, switched from Java to Dart/WebGL. e.g. a Doom renderer in Dart: https://github.com/xNotch/dark https://github.com/xNotch/dark , http://notch.net/2014/09/doom/ http://notch.net/2014/09/doom/
- kleiba 11y ago
  What does that "switch" mean in that context? He's (publically) played with a lot of different languages because he likes trying things out. But nothing on the scale of a new commercial game, since that's not what he's intending to do any more. http://notch.tumblr.com/post/58707926941/so-thats-what-im-going-to-do http://notch.tumblr.com/post/58707926941/so-thats-what-im-go...
  - frik 11y ago
    Your link is from 2013, mine was from 2014. He sold Minecraft to Microsoft. So he has no pressure to develop games, he does it for fun (little games these days). > played with a lot of different languages He experimented with the Unity game engine and Dart+WebGL - as seen in his Twitch streams and the little games he put on his personal website. Do you have any source for your claim?
    - kleiba 11y ago
      My point was more about the fact that -- as you also say -- isn't doing any professional game programming anymore. Minecraft was done in Java, but since he's only programming for fun now, I thought the term "switch" wasn't quite the right one here.

40 points by stesch 11y ago

Yeah, a few weeks old news. But yeah, their new frontend rendering 2.0 is in type script (brainfart can't remember name). Update: angularjs 2.0 In general I think Google should work with other browser such as Mozilla and Microsoft if they want a default language. I think Mozilla is firmly with Javascript seeing how they have Brendan Eich (creator of javascript). I'm also hoping there is a good alternative to javascript supported out of the box from other browsers. No transpiler. Don't get me wrong, I've invested a lot in learning Javascript but I really dislike it when you're writing tons of lines of code. Reason being it's loosely type and dynamic. edit: The reason for me thinking Mozilla sticking to javascript. They have lots of project in javascript, PDF renderer, etc.. They also have already allocating resources into Rust. And for a while now Microsoft and Google have offer their take on an alternative javascript (type script & dart). I don't recall Mozilla offering any alternative to javascript.

woah 11y ago
Typescript is JavaScript with some minimal annotations.
- karmakaze 11y ago
  I'm all in favour of TypeScript instead of JS. Unlike CoffeeScript (despite their 'it's just javascript') it is a superset so you can just rename .js .ts. So really TS: 'It's just JavaScript'.. but improved.
  - estava 11y ago
    Yes, TS is improved since it comes with the top IDE: VS. :-P Seriously though. Watching how people use IDE to code on Twitch can be so boring. Everyone is quick to suggest to step the code with the debugger. When just printing stuff to the console would be better. I hope that TypeScript never makes it into the browsers. I would take JavaScript without the types by default. It can even be more static than it is. But please, no types by default. Types make for bloated code. Someone yesterday spent 2 hours on Twitch dabbling with the Eclipse IDE and could not get unstuck, since they weren't even referring to the documentations or making quick changes to test their code.
    - _random_ 11y ago
      "Types make for bloated code" - no, poor type inference does.
      - estava 11y ago
        In theory. In practice many of the mainstream languages make for bloated code. Yesterday I was seeing type casts and so on increasing the size of the code. But developers can grow used to bloated code. Like they can get used to stepping the code with the debugger. I for one prefer to print debug info. On the browser I have custom code that helps with that. But I understand that many developers don't have anything like that and they have to use a standard debugger instead. I grew used to debugging with print outs on Ruby. Before that I used to use IDEs like Delphi and Eclipse. I also hear that one of the problems people may have on OCaml is that sometimes when they want to print some data structures they first have to make it printable. I like languages that make the structures printable by default like in Ruby. Anyways...
jacquesm 11y ago
> I think Mozilla is firmly with Javascript seeing how they have Brendan Eich (creator of javascript). had.
underwater 11y ago
Brendan Eich left Mozilla a while back. It sounds like you want Typescript and Flow. And they already exists. We shouldn't add another high level language in the browser. Developers are happy enough transpiling code and coupling language features to browser upgrade cycles doesn't make sense.
- _random_ 11y ago
  "...Developers are happy enough transpiling code..." - happy the way disaster survivors are happy to live in makeshift sheds rather than, you know, being dead. And the number of shed designs on offer doesn't matter.
lindig 11y ago
Google works on SoundScript [https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments]: graudual but sound typing for JavaScript with the goal to allow for more aggressive optimisation in the VM.
wwweston 11y ago
> I don't recall Mozilla offering any alternative to javascript. Mozilla is offering two alternatives to what most people probably mean by "JavaScript" (ECMAScript 3 or 5): 1) A better JavaScript, where more of missing things people complain about are present and most of the present things people complain about have options they're less likely to complain about (though a certain famous quote by Stroustrup comes to mind). 2) JavaScript as a well-performing target, something for people whose reasons for complaining are either subjective or simply unaddressable to go to without deeply fragmenting the browser-as-runtime.

jasonm23 11y ago

Even within google, Dart is only used in the Dart team... This is old news.

EugeneOZ 11y ago
Try to read article before commenting. Most important project of Google now using Dart for client-side. Dart tools are really great - they invested in IDE support, debugging tools, and it's a real pleasure to work with Dart. Only thing which stops me for using Dart on server-side is dynamic nature of language - I fed up by dynamic brittleness in PHP. But it's just me, and I'm sure there are billions of people who love dynamic languages. I'll try to use Dart for client-side code, when ng2 will be more ready for experiments (routing, http, forms). As PHP and Golang shows, solid (reach) std lib and good documentation are keys for fast and wide adoption, so I hope Dart team will also invest in std lib expanding and more human-friendly documentation. I wish them luck.
cbracken 11y ago
If you actually work at Google I would encourage you to do a search of the codebase for files named .*\.dart and you'll spot a broad cross-section of Google, from Google Fiber (set top box and the customer portal), to AdSense and AdWords, to Election Maps, to folks in Geo are using Dart for their front-ends.

lostit2xx 11y ago

It doesn't matter. Javascript is the default and what Google does with Dart does not matter unless everyone else is on board. This is a dumb, clickbait title. http://developers.whatwg.org/scripting-1.html#scriptingLanguages http://developers.whatwg.org/scripting-1.html#scriptingLangu...

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I have experimented a lot with Dart, both client and server side. I nice language and ecosystem. Smart move concentrating on compilation to JavaScript. Clojurescript has been my favorite client side language for a while, but I am considering jumping to Typescript - a really well designed and implemented language. It really doesn't seem to matter which language one writes in that can be transpiled to JavaScript. Pick one you like or just use plain JavaScript. This seems to be one of those cases where you can just pick what you like - a different situation than choosing between Java or C# or Haskell, etc.

kingmanaz 11y ago
>It really doesn't seem to matter which language one writes in that can be transpiled to JavaScript. Pick one you like or just use plain JavaScript. This seems to be one of those cases where you can just pick what you like - a different situation than choosing between Java or C# or Haskell, etc. Google should redirect the Dart project's resources toward the creation of a legibly-errored, fast, golang to js transpiler. The open source community has already performed the heavy lifting with the gopherjs project. Google should get on board and support its own language in browser space. A project like gopherjs would take off with the weight of Google behind it: all it needs are increased examples, tutorials, and publicity.
- tkubacki 11y ago
  Dart was designed to be be easy transpiled to JS. It's not possibile with Golang by design AFAIK. Also golang is not 'C-like' syntax lang so I doubt it would get any traction among mainstream devs (java,c,c#,js). Following your logic, one could argue that Google should drop Go and use only Dart since it's client and server since day 1. Both positions are silly IMHO.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Since I know it'll come up: no, we don't need a web bytecode. We already have JavaScript. Any new "web bytecode" would be unnecessarily reinventing the wheel, and lack most of JS's advantages. JS is a great compiler target. In fact, modern JS even includes features to make it more optimal for this (new Math functions, for instance).

hetman 11y ago
The problem with JavaScript is that it has a complex grammar which means startup times can suffer. Beyond that it does a pretty good job of substituting for a real bytecode (though it requires a bit of hoop jumping).
chimeracoder 11y ago
For the record, I did not downvote you (I actually upvoted you, since I think your comment contributes to the discussion, even though I disagree with it). > JS is a great compiler target. The only thing that makes Javascript an attractive compilation target is its ubiquity. The importance of ubiquity should not be discounted. Many languages have succeeded in their target markets on this basis alone, and Javascript may certainly be one of them! But let's not forget that, in almost every other way, it falls short of ideal. Some examples: * Very difficult to parse (while not strictly necessary for a compilation target, still very helpful) * Esoteric type conversion system (leads to bugs) * Lack of integral type (this can be worked around, but the fact that it needs to be worked around makes it a bad target). * Highly dynamic type system (makes it difficult to optimize code, and a good compilation target should be easy to optimize) * Paucity of parsers (I may be wrong, but to my knowledge, there are very few parsers that are neither (A) written in Javascript, or (B) developed as part of a browser rendering engine[0]. If I remember correctly, Facebook's Flow is one of the rare counterexamples[1].) * Single-threaded runtime (makes it challenging to implement languages that explicitly allow parallel execution as part of their semantics) There are ways to address each of these. For example, asm.js limits the scope of the language with the goal of increasing performance of a subset of the language. But they're still shortcomings that have to be dealt with in the first place. Not that any compilation target is perfect in all of the above ways, but Javascript's combination of all of these makes it a very frustrating choice. [0] For example, V8 and Spidermonkey were both originally motivated by Firefox and Chrome. The fact that so few people attempt to write their own (except in Javascript), even for fun/experimentation, should give a very rough indication of how challenging it is. [1] Someone may be able to provide clarity on this: I know Flow is written in OCaml, and I know that at least some of the parsing happens in OCaml, but I also know that Spidermonkey is involved somehow. Is it just that the AST produced is identical to the Spidermonkey AST, or does it actually use Spidermonkey itself at some part of the parsing process?

jayvanguard 11y ago

It was never going to be. Any language claiming to be the new web language needs to convince Google, Apple, and Microsoft to all cooperate and put it in their browsers. So any language created by just one of the three of them is dead in the water.

frik 11y ago
> So any language created by just one of the three of them is dead in the water. Have a look how Microsoft influenced JavaScript/ECMAScript 6+ with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. MS shaped ES6 how they wanted, Trojan horse or "Elop" style. Not at all surprising given the companies long extensive history (IBM, DOS, OS/2, Novell, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, Nokia). JavaScript was always a prototype inheritance based language, with ES6 it got the "class" keyword (syntactic sugar) from class inheritance based language (Java or the inspired C# from Hejlsberg): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototypal_inheritance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototypal_inheritance , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop (Ex-MS, Ex-Nokia, MS Trojan horse) JavaScript5 is a lean and nice language if one adheres to the "Good Parts" of Douglas Crockford. Some of the ES6/7 concepts were influenced and are in the wrong direction IMHO.
- aikah 11y ago
  > Have a look how Microsoft influenced JavaScript/ECMAScript 6+ with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. To say that Typescript influenced Javascript in anyway in revisionism(i.e. a blatant LIE) ES6 had classes way before Typescript. Furthermore, ES6 classes and Typescript classes are different. Typescript didn't influence ES6 at all. Most ES6 influences comes from Coffeescript and Python. Finally you're forgetting all the ES4 fiasco (basically JS looking like ActionScript3) where Microsoft said a BIG NO. So please explain us where you got the idea that Typescript influenced or is influencing ES6. Even if you consider annotations, Traceur(Google) had them before they were implemented by Yehuda in Typescript.

tkubacki 11y ago

snarky comments shows that we can't have fully open source and much better lang than JS (perf, sdk, lexical this, tooling, IDE) replacing JS because of...google ressentiment

shockzzz 11y ago
what?

frik 11y ago

Notch, the Minecraft creator, switched from Java to Dart/WebGL. e.g. a Doom renderer in Dart: https://github.com/xNotch/dark https://github.com/xNotch/dark , http://notch.net/2014/09/doom/ http://notch.net/2014/09/doom/

kleiba 11y ago
What does that "switch" mean in that context? He's (publically) played with a lot of different languages because he likes trying things out. But nothing on the scale of a new commercial game, since that's not what he's intending to do any more. http://notch.tumblr.com/post/58707926941/so-thats-what-im-going-to-do http://notch.tumblr.com/post/58707926941/so-thats-what-im-go...
- frik 11y ago
  Your link is from 2013, mine was from 2014. He sold Minecraft to Microsoft. So he has no pressure to develop games, he does it for fun (little games these days). > played with a lot of different languages He experimented with the Unity game engine and Dart+WebGL - as seen in his Twitch streams and the little games he put on his personal website. Do you have any source for your claim?
  - kleiba 11y ago
    My point was more about the fact that -- as you also say -- isn't doing any professional game programming anymore. Minecraft was done in Java, but since he's only programming for fun now, I thought the term "switch" wasn't quite the right one here.