Other than a nicer DOM API (which libraries provide in JavaScript), real ints and less type coercion, I still find Dart inferior to JavaScript+CoffeeScript.
Are there really that many people out there that like Java the language (as opposed to the JVM)?
I like C#, which is a lot like Java. I'd like Java more if it picked up a few things from C# (automatic properties, for instance, would pretty much make my day).
You mean a bytecode format together with a tool to translate it to JavaScript? Or did you mean convincing all the major browsers to add support for a bytecode that has no code compiled to it yet?
Well, if I were the lead engineer/vision guy at Teh Goog, here's what I'd shoot for:
* Put out a specification for browser bytecode, focusing on keeping it as simple and close to javascript
* Build an translator or emulator for it in javascript
* Support it natively in Chrome
There'd be a wave of interest in it from the languages community and that would put a lot of pressure on the other browsers to support it (and if they don't, the translator would run it anyway.)
Nobody is going to convince the other browsers of anything, except users.
Dart fixes the DOM (...). The Dart team has created a new HTML library for adding events, finding elements, adding elements, that takes advantage of Dart's syntax.
With new ES features such as getters, setters and proxies it should be possible to create exactly the same DOM API wrapper in JavaScript.
Are there really that many people out there that like Java the language (as opposed to the JVM)?