Why is Dart keeping certain cruft from other languages?

https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/misc/8vfICVygruE

by jarek-foksa • 14 years ago

24 55 14 years ago

groups.google.com

svachalek• 14 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something big but Dart looks to me like Slightly Better Java, yet another boring incremental improvement on languages that are well past their sell-by date. There are plenty of more daring and yet more mature alternatives that already provide the security of running on a Java or Javascript VM (Scala, CoffeeScript, etc) so I'm really fuzzy on just what they're trying to do here.

teffen• 14 years ago

Well it's like different, but similar!

Raphael_Amiard• 14 years ago

> CoffeeScript

How is coffeescript 'daring' in any way ? It is a thin veneer on top of javascript, syntactic sugar for your coffee.

Dart is a hundred times more daring. It is trying to push optional typing. No mainstream language has such a feature, and not even so much non-mainstream ones.

It doesn't say anything about my opinion of any of those two languages (i actually use and like CoffeeScript), but it just sounds to me like you're looking at syntax only, where the important part of a language is its semantics.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

> Dart is a hundred times more daring. It is trying to push optional typing. No mainstream language has such a feature, and not even so much non-mainstream ones.

I long for the day when statically typed/dynamic language debates are considered quaint and old-timey.

There was an article posted to HN, where someone instrumented web apps and determined that after some short "warm-up" period, even variables in web apps written in dynamic languages had static types. If a tracing JIT eventually knows what type is in all the variables, why can't we have a development process that uses this information? Isolate all of the "dynamic" code in separate modules marked as such (the JIT could tell us what those sections are) and inject the type information back into the source code. Production servers could keep track of such information over many months, and the developers could know with a high degree of certainty what all the types in all of the variables are.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Closure Compiler for JS has optional typing.

azakai3• 14 years ago

> How is coffeescript 'daring' in any way ? It is a thin veneer on top of javascript, syntactic sugar for your coffee.

CoffeeScript does compile into JS, but so does Dart. Both are in that sense just syntactic sugar.

CoffeeScript does make quite big changes to syntax though (often inspired by Ruby, Python, etc.) in many cases more than Dart which seems inspired by Java - and I don't think anyone considers Java 'inspiring' (useful and familiar, sure).

> Dart is a hundred times more daring. It is trying to push optional typing. No mainstream language has such a feature, and not even so much non-mainstream ones.

ActionScript.

dantheman• 14 years ago

I'm not fully informed about Dart's optional typing, but how is it different from ActionScript 3's optional type system?

batista2• 14 years ago

>Maybe I'm missing something big but Dart looks to me like Slightly Better Java, yet another boring incremental improvement on languages that are well past their sell-by date.

It wasn't made to be exciting. For exiting go look elsewhere.

It was made for some very pragmatic goals:

1) to be used in the same context as Javascript (web clients mostly but some server too) 2) Look familiar to JS programmers 3) be more like Java and remove the bizarro JS behavior 4) be able to be made faster than V8 5) add some handy stuff to the mix.

Exciting does not come into play at all, and with this goals it should not.

With "exciting" you get Haskell or Clojure, languages with such small following that they celebrate it with blog posts when they are used by some company (personally, I like both, and they are both better than Dart for tons of things but not for Dart's specific goals).

Not that Dart is used by anyone as of now, but one of their goals is to have it be used. And conventional beats "exciting" every time in this goal (All the major used languages: C, C++, Java, JS, Python, Ruby, Perl, C#, all fairly similar and conventional).

goldfeld3• 14 years ago

Except they are "only" trying to replace perhaps the single most ingrained language of all time, that is, Javascript in browsers. And I'll warrant that the more ingrained a language is, the more it's contender needs to be exciting, and yes, even hyped, and catter to developer motivation and happiness. For pure technical gains, I think there's huge resistance to be found.

Having said that, I think they could find some success in, say, making Chrome run Dart natively (as well as Javascript for the time being) and then getting other more hyped languages to compile to Dart.

sethladd5• 14 years ago

If Dart, at first blush, looks familiar, then we've done our job. :) We freely admit that our job was not to make the world's most pure or esoteric language. Dart is a tool to get real jobs done and to be easy to use for a wide range of developers. Our hackathon experience shows that our learning curve is low.

That being said, if you poke around and try the language, you'll see quite a few significant improvements and exciting features. I wouldn't say it's "slightly better", I would say there are some significant enhancements.

Some significant improvements include:

* Isolates for shared-nothing concurrency. Shared-state threads are error prone.

* Optional types. You don't always need to prove the entire world is validated by some ceremonial type checker. Web programming especially is a workflow where you want to "write some code, hit reload" and iterate as fast as possible. Also, sometimes you just can't express what you want with your type system. Optional types is a way to say "I was going to cast to Object anyway, so let's dispence with the pleasantries and just use var."

* Everything is an object. No more "some things are primitives, some things aren't."

* Arbitrarily sized integers. 'nuff said.

* Not everything has to be in a class. Dart has top-level functions. This makes utility libraries significantly easier to use.

* A package manager as a native part of the ecosystem. This encourages 3rd party developers to share code early.

* Significantly faster start up. Go ahead and print out all the classes that are loaded when you run a simple Hello World program with the JVM. We'll wait. :)

* (related to the above) All Dart programs actually start running with main(). Turns out, this is not the case in JVM, due to how statics are initialized.

* Snapshots. Load code and libraries from a serialized binary heap. Significant startup performance improvements.

* Compile-time constants. These are canonicalized, and make for easy way to share data across isolates (they are immutable, for instance).

* Named optional parameters, with default values.

* All exceptions are uncaught.

* Throw any object. So you can throw "This is a crazy one-off error"

* Dartdoc comments can have markdown. This is awesome. :)

* A file can have a mix of classes and top-level functions.

* Lexical closures! (no more need for anonymous inner classes)

* Operator overloading.

* Method cascades. See http://www.dartlang.org/articles/m1-language-changes/#cascad...

All that really matters is "Are real developers more productive and having more fun? Are real developers launching more exciting apps?" That is the true test for Dart or any web language. Our experience is that evolutions, not revolutions, are a successful way to adoption.

Disclaimer: I'm a long time Java user and I have respect for the platform. I've written books on it, and launched many apps with it.

leastfixedpoint• 14 years ago

I smell comparison to Java in every point. How about comparing to Javascript, in whose domain Dart intrudes? Or, even better, CoffeeScript? ;)

trotsky• 14 years ago

when did it become so trendy to hate semicolons?

seanmcdirmid4• 14 years ago

A small but very vocal sub community of programmers hates semicolons. Really, semicolons are nice for readability and nice for your tools, as they make statement termination explicit. I was on the losing side (a semicolon lover) of this debate when it came to scala.

icebraining• 14 years ago

I think this is mostly bikeshedding, but I can't agree with your statement.

The claim is not that we shouldn't have explicit statement terminating characters. It's that we already have one - new lines - and that mandating semicolons is both redundant and bug prone.

Personally, and while it doesn't really affect my choice of languages, I think you should be able to use one or the other, but not two consecutively.

In any case, excuse me for posting this, and I promise I won't discuss it here any more.

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

Isn't this part of a trend to reduce the presence of statements (enforcing order-based reasoning) ? With javascript ubiquity and mainstream presence of lexical closure people converge toward functional, encoding of patterns, even sequences.

goldfeld3• 14 years ago

Around the same time vi won over emacs.

rdtsc3• 14 years ago

since many realized they are not needed...?

why do you need semicolons?

pcwalton• 14 years ago

These are all superficial syntactic complaints, following Wadler's law. My experience is that every new language gets more than its fair share of these.

reinhardt• 14 years ago

Any fool can have an opinion about syntax, mostly based on personal taste. To argue about semantics though you have to actually know something.

Xcelerate3• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516619

Xcelerate3• 14 years ago

This shouldn't have been downvoted.

tdrd• 14 years ago

I can feel myself getting dumber reading this discussion. Christoph Husse is a donkey.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

If code branches in the woods and no one is around to program it, does it start a flamewar?

Does anyone use Dart?

goatslacker• 14 years ago

Why does Dart look so boring? I'm just not buying that whole "familiarity" argument. If a language is truly great then I'm sure people will learn how to express their thoughts in that language.

I know syntax isn't everything in a language but it's pretty important. There are much better (IMO) ways to express yourself than the approach Dart takes.

rdtsc3• 14 years ago

> Why does Dart look so boring?

So it appeals to the widest (and thus) more average programmer.

Languages have an implicit audience and purpose. For example I consider Java a language designed to be consumed by code-monkeys. The mentality that you have a large enterprise project and you look to India to hire 200 programmers to finish it for you. The language has to have static typing, it has to be familiar to those learning previous languages (C++, C), IDEs are the preferred work environments, everything is very explicit and verbose.

Take Haskell, it is a language that would appeal to an academically minded developer. Someone who knows about catamorphisms, uses words like endofunctor, or say wouldn't mind struggling for weeks to comprehend what a Monad is.

Those are 2 different audiences. Neither language is better or worse, they are just tools and in some cases one is a better fit, in other case another one is.

Dart is closer to the Java.. It wants to be used in large code bases, by many (including average and junior) programmers. So adding things like fancy list comprehensions, de-structuring assignment, pattern matching and stuff like that, might not fit with its goals.

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

One thing I would love to see in languages that can work with single or double quotes is a practice like double quoted strings are text that will be displayed to users and single quoted won't. That way editors and tools can automatically help with localization, and can spot when you mix and match.

Why is Dart keeping certain cruft from other languages?

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