

Thoughts on Dash/Dart - scorchin
http://qfox.nl/weblog/241

======
nxn
I agree with practically everything said in the post short of this part:

> It's my hope (for that's all I can do right now...) that some of the great
> minds at Google actually hashed out some of the issues from js, put down a
> formal specification and created the new language that's "like js", but
> better.

I disagree with this mostly because I had hopes for a fast lightweight VM that
could at least support multiple languages. Now that it's clear we're not going
to get such a VM, I'd at least hope that we get something as far away from
JavaScript as possible. If you want "like js", then just use JS as the
compilation target for the language like CoffeeScript does, but make it
suitable to a different side of JS than CoffeeScript. For example, a language
that is better at functional programming, to contrast Coffee's OO favoring
approach. It could still be JavaScript like and implemented on top of it
without major complications (maybe a lack of tail recursion 'optimization'
might be a problem?)

But as for Dart, I'd rather it be something that doesn't translate to JS very
well, so that we at least have a broader range of what can easily be done in a
browser. Of course I realize that this probably wont be the case since they
already claimed it would be a dynamic language with only optional type
checking. At this point I'm just hoping it will be re-branded newspeak,
because honestly, that would be a pretty interesting language as an option.
Plus with Bracha doing Google Tech Talks, his language fitting the description
fairly well, and his blog posts talking about a Newspeak -> JS compilers in
recent months, Dart might actually have a chance of being Newspeak in
disguise.

EDIT: By the way, I don't think Jash Kenas being more familiar with language
design would have made CoffeeScript any different/better than it is. A big
part of its success is that it's just a more modern day JavaScript, and the
core design of JS wasn't really affected very much (scoping being the biggest
change I think). This allows the generated code to be easy to read, and makes
learning CoffeeScript fairly quick. I think both are major factors in CS
getting so popular so quickly.

Oh, and as I recall, he did a great job of taking input from other JS
developers through out CS' development process. So it's not really like he
locked himself in a basement and created the whole thing by himself. In fact,
he probably did a much better job at this than Google did with Dart.

