
Dart is Dead - horrido
https://medium.com/@richardeng/dart-is-dead-aedced9fd3d1
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joeld42
I'm still using it. It's a nice language.

Just because something isn't super trendy, doesn't mean it's not a useful
tool.

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agapos
So I started reading this small article (as a piece of opinion, not sure what
to call it), and suddenly Touhou. Not something I expect in a rant about a
programming language.

But back on topic: I believe Dart was doomed to die as a JS replacement for
the sole reason it was not the joint work of all mayor browser vendors, but an
attempt of dominance of a single one.

~~~
nailer
Agreed.

\- CoffeeScript came from the JS community (the author also writes underscore,
the most popular JavaScript module)

\- Many frontend web developers are also Ruby or Python developers

\- Typescript came from Microsoft, who use it to do big apps like xbox music.
Seperately, C# has beautiful ideas about inline-async via generators that are
similar to yield in ES6. They get async, and Typescript is still more popular
than Dart.

\- Although not browser/DOM related, Swift shows what Apple considers valuable
in a language.

\- JavaScript now has the largest package manager of any programming language
thanks to npm

Whatever succeeds in replacing JavaScript should come from all of those. Dart
had a great DOM API, but bared very little resemblance to the languages web
developers actually prefer to use.

~~~
xxgreg
> C# has beautiful ideas about inline-async via generators that are similar to
> yield in ES6

Dart also has async/await, and synchronous generators using yield.

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lgunsch
I have written apps in Dart, CoffeeScript, and JavaScript. CoffeeScript is a
definite improvement on JavaScript, but I find it still lacks a lot compared
to Dart. I still hope Dart takes off, and any new language needs at least 10
years to gain any amount of significant support.

I also find that JavaScript developers _love_ their spaghetti code. Bad code
proliferates in the JavaScript world. Many may disagree with me, but the
empirical evidence does not. Just look at the codebase for any major product,
like jQuery for example. I have encountered JavaScript developers with years
of experience encourage practice that in any other language would be
considered a "hack."

Edit: By this, I mean some JavaScript developers will not like Dart because
it's too different and restrictive compared with JavaScript.

~~~
wnevets
cant this be said about any language as popular as javascript?

~~~
lgunsch
That depends significantly on the language. All languages have lots of bad
code of course, but I think the JavaScript community (and the language) itself
promotes bad code. Or, at least un-intentionally fosters it.

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bitemix
When Dart was released, I was curious to see if they'd position it as an
alternative to Java on Android.

They hired kevmoo (a pretty well-respected Seattle area engineer and game dev)
as a PM, which again led me to believe they were perhaps looking at game dev
on Dart on Android. I fully expected them to start shipping Android with the
Dart VM, open up a new set of Android packages for taking advantage of
existing/native stuff, and boom: suddenly the Android ecosystem benefits from
a new set of developers coming at it from the web angle. That's what Ludei and
others have been trying to promote. This goes deeper into solving perf issues,
however.

Now that Chrome tabs are represented as individual windows in Android 5.0, the
line between "app" and "web app" on mobile is ever more blurry.

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kolev
The only use of Dart I've seen in the wild is Notch's Ludum Dare work...
Although it's a good language, it's not great and doesn't offer much more than
what's in the wild. So, Google should use the good pieces and merge them in
other projects.

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skiskilo
Personally I believe that once Dart development is finished, Google will roll
the good parts of the server-side pieces to Go and frontend into
ATScript/Angular 2.0.

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WorldMaker
Supposedly one of the reasons ATScript isn't just a small fork of TypeScript
and instead is an oddly reimplemented TypeScript built on top of Traceur is so
that ATScript can still compile to Dart, so apparently at least a few people
on Angular 2.0 still like Dart...

