Google Starts to Detail Dart 219
MrSeb writes "After waiting for more than a month, Google has unveiled its mysterious Dart programming language... and you're going to kick yourself for getting so preemptively excited. Dart is a new programming language that looks like Java, acts a lot like Java, runs inside a virtual machine like Java... but ominously, it also has a tool that converts Dart code into JavaScript. Language-wise, its features are unlikely to knot your panties: there are classes and interfaces, it is optionally typed (you can switch between untyped prototype code to an enterprise app with typing), the syntax is very lackluster, there's a very strong concurrency model, and Google is promising lots of juicy libraries that can be leveraged by developers. Basically, the language isn't meant to be exciting: in Google's own words, it's designed to be 'familiar and natural' — and indeed, if you write Java or C# code, Dart will probably feel very approachable."
Re:Bad article and summary (Score:2, Interesting)
just great... Java took at the 'best' ideas of C++ and then mangled it into something pretty nasty - a memory and resource hog with poor performance, especially for GUIs, and added non-deterministic finalisation (eventually - the original didn't even have that!) with verbose OO code everywhere. The only good thing it gives is a huge set of libraries.
C# took that and did even more to it, so much so that you require an IDE to write code.
So what does Google do? Take these languages and builds on top of them even more! Great, just great.
Why don't they go back to the source, learn the mistakes that Java made (yes, some were just design decisions, others were due to the limitations of computing back then) and create a language initially based on C++ with the good bits of that included. Modern C++ is pretty good, if Google could update it by removing the 'backward compatible with C' stuff, and some of its poor design decisions (eg auto_ptr for example) then there's a good chance we'd get something pretty damn good.
As it is, I imagine Dart will be just Java in all but name with a javascript compiler. I doubt anyone will be too enthused about that if they can write javascript in the first place.
Re:It's not a bad thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Take Python. I love its syntax, the plethora of libraries available, the ability to rapidly prototype and see immediate results. All the things that make it "fun" really do make it productive (shorter time to a final, correctly coded solution). It's a great language. However, it doesn't run as fast as C/C++ code, for obvious reasons (interpreted, dynamic typing, etc.). There are ways to make it faster (rewriting critical subsections in C/C++, using fast libraries intelligently, various optimizers and pseudo-compilers exist, etc.). But everyone (or at least me) would love to code using Python syntax but have the code run as fast as C/C++. Best of both worlds.
In other words, what I would love to see is tons of effort put into making toolchains for making Python (or other "fun" languages) faster (and probably by association more enterprisey in terms of being type-safe, etc.). I'm not saying doing this would be easy, but there are various proofs-of-principle for compiling Python code or automatically converting it to C/C++ code and whatnot. It could be done and would allow programmers to use the clean syntax of Python to more rapidly code a project without feeling bad about the performance not being up to scratch.
Again, I'm aware of the alternatives (rewrite bottlenecks in a fast external, etc.). But it seems to me that we've learned a lot about what makes for a nice high-level syntax, so we should automate the grunt-work of converting that syntax into fast low-level code. (Yes, I'm aware of gotchas such as dynamic typing preventing full compiling in some cases, but something like adding type hints to a high-level language would surely be less onerous for programmers than going to a lower abstraction level wholesale. Even type hints could be automatically inferred by a parser in a lot of cases, with a programmer checking that they make sense...)