Thoughts on Dash/Dart

by scorchin • 15 years ago

3 1 15 years ago

nxn• 15 years ago

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.

Thoughts on Dash/Dart

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