
Dart is on Chromium – and Dart meets Scala - grobmeier
http://www.grobmeier.de/dart-on-chromium-and-dart-meets-scala-17122011.html
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fauigerzigerk
I always loved to learn new programming languages but for the first time I
feel like I want to be more conservative.

It seems there are two kinds of new languages. The ones that inspire new
thinking about problems but never catch on, and the ones that are small
variations of C/Java, inspire no new thinking whatsoever but still cause lots
of boring transition issues if they catch on.

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icefox
Ugg, of all of the languages that would have been nice to be the first second
language dart is not on that list.

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gtani
Damn, that sentence is gnarly for verb/noun phrase antecedents taggers.

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zobzu
Yay let's make the web non-standard!

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georgemcbay
More like: "Let's evolve the web".

Nobody is going to write a website that doesn't render well across the major
browsers, so anyone who codes in Dart will just configure their site to either
serve Dart->JS converted code or Dart depending on if the user is in Chrome.

End result? Web keeps working just as it always has. Chrome users get a better
experience, but non-Chrome users get a similar experience to what they already
get.

If this drives more people towards Chrome -- good. Maybe that will convince
other browser manufacturers to get off their asses and either really evolve
JavaScript to be competitive (instead of the constant chants of 'Just wait
until the next version... going to be awesome then!'), or just adopt Dart.

The web evolving is much more important than mindlessly following existing
"standards". Nothing good ever comes _from_ formal standardization
processes... the best we can hope for is standardization after the fact.

JavaScript itself was something Netscape threw into Navigator, the
standardization came later. Same exact situation (possibly) as Dart, if it is
successful. This is a _good_ thing.

If Dart can't beat JS on the merits, it will die because developers won't
adopt it. If it can beat JavaScript on the merits, then good on it,
competition is a _good thing_. Remember?

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kevingadd
Which part of:

* More divergence in browser script runtimes

* More divergence in standard libraries in script runtimes

* Slower performance than native JS due to Dart cross-compilation in non-Chromium browsers

* A more difficult debugging experience for Dart authors and regular web users due to obfuscated dart JS, bugs in dart runtimes, and bugs in dart compilers

seems like evolution to you? Dart does absolutely nothing useful at present.
Your claim that Dart will just 'die off' if it lacks merit because of
developers rejecting it is ridiculous. Google will shove it down everyone's
throats whether it's good or not.

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georgemcbay
The first & second parts certainly seem like evolution to me.

The slower performance than native JS issue remains to be seen. I believe
Dart, when fully baked, will generate code very similar in performance to
"native" JS. In fact, I think it'll probably be better than your average hand-
rolled JS code that doesn't use something like Google's Closure Compiler
already. In any case, unless the generated code is substantially slower than
"native" JavaScript (which there is no basis to believe will be true), this is
a bit disingenuous of an argument coming from the web crowd who also advocate
writing mobile web apps instead of native apps where you're taking a big speed
hit for other benefits. Software is all about making trade-offs (hopefully the
right ones).

As far as a more difficult debugging experience -- I think Dart will offer the
opposite, a much richer debugging experience for the developer's own code in
the form of debugging within the native Dart VM. The non-Google developer
shouldn't have to debug issues that arise due to the JS translation layer,
that's on Google to get right, and again if they don't get that right
developers just won't use the technology. I certainly think that whatever
Dart's debugging experience ends up being will be much better than the
debugging experience for CoffeeScript and other X->JS languages that the
JavaScript-only crowd like to reference when talking about how JavaScript is
already an adequate "VM".

As far as Google shoving it down everyone's throat -- what is your basis for
that claim? What have they shoved down everyone's throat so far? Wave? With
all due respect to Google, they don't have the power to shove anything down
developer's throats. They can simply develop new technology and hope that it
offers developers enough real-world benefit that they will adopt it
organically.

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tree_of_item
The "standards" drum is absolutely mind boggling. Netscape flooded the early
web with proprietary extensions and we should be thankful that they did. "It's
not standard" is not a reason to dismiss something out of hand.

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joshontheweb
Does this mean it will necessarily end up in a final release or is this just
an experiment? Seems weird to divide progress like this.

