
"Future of JavaScript" doc from our internal "JavaScript Summit" (2010) - jalan
https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/1208618
======
CurtHagenlocher
I remember reading this on HN almost three years ago. Is there anything about
it that makes it interesting again now?

~~~
rdtsc
In summary, the way I see it: A lot of hipsters that hunt and jump on the
latest tech bandwagon hated that AngularJS team ported their framework to
Dart. So they started spewing hate and vitriol at Google and Dart developers.
The underlying sentiment I read was -- "you mean I will be stuck unable to
tell everyone I work with the latest bleeding edge tech because there is a
newer, cooler faster hemorrhaging tech out there, after I spent nights online
evangelizing about how awesome this last bandwagon I jumped on is"

It was rather amusing and sad. The amusing part is how the stereotype of
immaturity and childishness was just re-enforcing itself. The sad part is that
here is Google spending man months (and heck, if you know me, I don't like
Google's privacy track record as anyone else here) of work and giving it back
to the community and as a thank you they got spit in the face ("how dare you
release open source projects, that you spend money developing, in a direction
I don't agree with!").

~~~
mtrimpe
> A lot of hipsters that hunt and jump on the latest tech bandwagon

> people who jumped on the Angular JS platform are quite fond of just that --
> jumping on the latest technology .... They will be hipsters who are still
> drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon while all other cooler hipsters are drinking
> Tecate already. [1]

Ad hominem much?

Some people object to what can very well be interpreted as (whether true or
not) an attempt by a large corporation to fragment a market to their own
benefit.

You don't need hipsterism to explain some degree of antipathy towards this
move.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6679565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6679565)

~~~
rdtsc
> Ad hominem much?

It is an analogy used to illustrate a point. I think it is funny, short, and
explains the sentiment pretty well.

The point is how I perceive what is happening. No, I didn't collect
statistical data on anyone confessing their true feelings.

> You don't need hipsterism to explain some degree of antipathy towards this
> move.

I disagree, one does need something like that explain the _level_ of vitriol.

Read cletus' comment in that thread. He perhaps explains it better than me and
he uses less colorful metaphors (I can see you don't like those much, but
that's fine).

~~~
mtrimpe
I've read cletus' comment and while I respect and understand his world view;
in mine this is about as good for the web as Internet Explorer's VBScript and
ActiveX integration.

I'm a bit more civil about it than others but dragging accusations of
hipsterism into this both ignores Occam's Razor and needlessly denigrates the
(perfectly valid) world view that this is not a good development.

~~~
rdtsc
> You don't need hipsterism to explain some degree of antipathy towards this
> move.

See I disagree in the validity of that viewpoint but that is not as much of a
problem. I disagree in _how_ that viewpoint was made. I felt Google was
attacked unfairly in this case.

"Hipsterism" was an analogy I used to illustrate a point in fewer lines of
text, I wouldn't get hung up on it too much rather the attitude and level of
hate brought by Angular JS community should be discussed.

------
vezzy-fnord
I haven't had much experience with Dart, but from observation and brief casual
use it strikes me as if Google looked at JavaScript and decided that the way
to fix it is by removing the "Script" part.

~~~
afsina
Far from it. [http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-
langu...](http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you-
think-it-is.html)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
A few of these differences are subtle or largely not drastic.

Terse main function -> why a main function in the first place?

The VM excluding the compilation into bytecode is a runtime difference, not a
purely language one.

Pure OO is a natural consequence of having an optional typing system, thus
removing the necessity for primitive data types.

Multiple classes, no mandatory class requirement, multiple inheritance and
operator overloading are all fine. These are improvements to the Java model,
allowing for more power.

String interpolation is fine, it removes the need for the bloated
String.format() method or inelegant string concatenations in Java.

I never said that Dart was a complete Java clone, however. I implied that its
design was largely motivated by a philosophy to apply a Java-esque model for
the web. Of course they've made some improvements, but I don't find it that
great in general.

I think the web would benefit from a client-side scripting language based on
Dylan. The semantics of Lisp with the syntax of ALGOL. Since the web is
becoming largely data-driven, having code as data would be a big advantage,
while still retaining a familiar syntax.

------
chromanoid
Even if this is old, I don't understand why they don't push an open Browser VM
spec. This would be much more open and fruitful.

~~~
TillE
Yeah, a flexible bytecode VM seems like the ideal solution for browser
scripting, rather than the awful kludge of "compiling" things to Javascript.
I'm not quite sure why there hasn't been more effort towards that.

~~~
modarts
[https://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-
bytecode/](https://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-bytecode/)

~~~
pera
> The key argument in favor of a language VM is the development process.

> If you’re writing JavaScript, your “compile step” is just refreshing the
> browser.

This is not a really strong argument: the _development process_ could be
exactly the same if your development environment automate certain task, as
syntax checking (like with jslint), recompile when the sources have changed
(ie file watch functionality), reload when save (like with tincr)...

------
Tarang
In short they wanted to make a new language called Dash/Dart that solved the
problems around javascript.

------
knodi
Yes, death to javascript. I for some will not miss it and hope for its demise.

~~~
_random_
You are not alone :). Non-JS devs are just generally less vocal.

------
jalan
OP here, this post was originally titled - Google Dash/Dart: Leaked Internal
Email

Edit: IMHO, I think the above title was better suited for this post. I respect
the fact that HN moderators modified it to email subject, it refers to, but
the title should have at least included keyword "Google".

------
solomatov
It's such a pity that Google choose to create such a flawed language as Dart
instead of promoting GWT or creating a better Java for the web (which Kotlin
might become). Yes, it is better than JavaScript but, IMHO, optional types is
not a language feature but a built-in language flaw.

~~~
nixarn
Really? Java is absolutely horrible. Dart looks exciting and up to modern
standards.

~~~
solomatov
What are modern standards? Ruby, Python and JavaScript? No. Thanks.

------
jamra
I played around with Dart for a while. It is really great having a debugging
console while you are working. The difficulty I had is that the popular
frameworks do not target Dart so you'll always be a step behind when using
Dart. I don't know if it's possible to port over a javascript framework, but I
wonder what the benefit would really be. After all, you would still be using
the framework's code structure. That kind of minimizes the benefit of using
Dart.

If they can make a nice web framework (like angular, backbone, etc) they'll
find the niche that they need to fill.

~~~
mtrimpe
This article is (probably) posted in response to AngularDart being released
recently [1], which was seen by some as an attempt by Google to push
fragmented web standards.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6677481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6677481)

~~~
jamra
Thank you. The context makes a lot of sense to me now.

------
sum_yung_guy
How does Dart compare to TypeScript? Dart never seemed to live up to
performance expectations, from what I can tell. JS debugging is improving
thanks to Mozilla and such. Where is the benefit?

~~~
afsina
AFAIK TypeScript is a language which is a super-set of Javascript so in a
sense it contains the flaws of it. Dart is a more ambitious project as it
contains a completely new language, a VM, a development browser called Dartium
including the VM for fast development cycle and debugging, a modularity system
(pub), a quite large client and server side library, a stand alone editor and
a javascript trnaslator (dart2js). It also works in server side.

------
_random_
They really should have just picked a better existing language... High risk
did not get rewarded for them :(.

------
eknkc
Anyone uses Dart on production?

~~~
adrianlmm
I do, and it is awesome, I cannot back to JS after using Dart.

~~~
eknkc
Dart looks pretty good to me actually. But it's from Google and that scares me
at this point.

ES6 also gonna be pretty good but it's still not released and I think it'll be
at year 2030 or something.

~~~
cpeterso
ECMA plans to sign-off on ES6 in December 2014:
[https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-
discuss/2013-November/...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-
discuss/2013-November/034557.html)

But browsers are already rolling out some ES6 features now:
[http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-
table/es6/](http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/)

~~~
eknkc
"For ES6, 2014 should be a year of cleanup and minor refinement."

A whole year. I'm not gonna pretend that I have any idea how this process
works. Still, what kind of a cleanup takes a year? Cities recovered from
natural disasters much faster.

------
filipedeschamps
What will happen with V8 engine and Node.js?

