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Please read the comment to which you link. I was not hostile to Dart, rather I did vent a bit in refuting bogus crediting of Dart for things going into JS in ES

Please read the comment to which you link. I was not hostile to Dart, rather I did vent a bit in refuting bogus crediting of Dart for things going into JS in ES6/2015 and ES7/2016. My criticisms of Dart on HN over the years have all been about the way it was developed: in secret first, with an aim to replace JS that could not work, with serious dart2js bugs not in DartVM left to lie for years; and the consequent lack of JS uplift, seeming to bet all on DartVM in the long run. That long-odds bet did not work out, and it cost years of time during which even more features Dart needs in JS, notably int (bignum) support, could have been done sooner, even possibly in ES6. All bygones now, but the point here is that I mainly avoided criticizing Dart language design (much is good, some a bit boring as the designers concede) in preference to criticizing the technical politics and market power play.

michaelwww 11y ago
It was very unfortunate that the first time that most heard about Dart was through a leaked memo from Google predicting Dart would replace JavaScript [http://pastebin.com/NUMTTrKj http://pastebin.com/NUMTTrKj]. It created an atmosphere of hostility towards Dart that I'm sure the developers didn't deserve. I now understand your objections and I'm sorry I lumped you in with the general hostility. My own doubts about Dart after using it for a commercial app, began after watching this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM] where Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak discuss Dart and TypeScript. I felt Anders made a better case for TypeScript and Lars was feeling a bit threatened, which confirmed for me that Anders was right. Considering where Dart and TypeScript are today, I made the right choice moving to TypeScript. The other problem that I felt wasn't being addressed was that the Dart2js output and JavaScript interop needed a lot of improvement. Since it became clear that the DartVM was not landing in other browsers, this should have been a top priority and it wasn't. Now it is a priority, but it's not clear to me how many resources Google is giving to it. I'm very glad that the path is much clearer these days and thank you for your efforts to sort these things out.

michaelwww 11y ago

It was very unfortunate that the first time that most heard about Dart was through a leaked memo from Google predicting Dart would replace JavaScript [http://pastebin.com/NUMTTrKj http://pastebin.com/NUMTTrKj]. It created an atmosphere of hostility towards Dart that I'm sure the developers didn't deserve. I now understand your objections and I'm sorry I lumped you in with the general hostility. My own doubts about Dart after using it for a commercial app, began after watching this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM] where Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak discuss Dart and TypeScript. I felt Anders made a better case for TypeScript and Lars was feeling a bit threatened, which confirmed for me that Anders was right. Considering where Dart and TypeScript are today, I made the right choice moving to TypeScript. The other problem that I felt wasn't being addressed was that the Dart2js output and JavaScript interop needed a lot of improvement. Since it became clear that the DartVM was not landing in other browsers, this should have been a top priority and it wasn't. Now it is a priority, but it's not clear to me how many resources Google is giving to it. I'm very glad that the path is much clearer these days and thank you for your efforts to sort these things out.