Google begins to detail Dart, a Javascript alternative

[J65nko]

From http://h-online.com/-1358012

Rumours that Google was working on a second language – to join Go – to take on JavaScript within the browser have now been confirmed as the company begins to give details of the Dart language, which it says is designed for "structured web programming". The details are available on a new web site, dartlang.org. The language designers say they had three goals: create a structured yet flexible language for web programming, make it familiar and natural to programmers, and offer high performance on modern devices.

[TerryP]

While Go got my interest, I must admit, Dart registered so little a blip that I've almost entirely ignored it's existence :-/

[Carpetsmoker]

They kept the DOM API, which is arguably the worst of the entire Javascript experience.

Other than that, it doesn't seem a whole lot different to Javascript, other than that it actually *does* resemble Java (Javascript *does not*, it's the worst name in the history of computing and then some). This is not a good thing IMHO.

I don't feel that there's a lot wrong with Javascript as such, although many problems do surround it, many are not specific to Javascript. There's a bunch of stuff you'd better not use and some other "quirks", but nothing that can't be fixed (The ECMAScript 5 standard fixes quite a bit of that already).

One of the bigger pains is the DOM API, and Dart doesn't fix that. It also keeps the window global, and, as far as I can see, no separation of privileges surrounding it (Meaning stuff like ads and facebook apps can access it).

So ... I wonder what problems does this actually solve? It removes the best part of javascript (functional programming, really neat inheritance) and replaced those with the ugly Java-alternatives. Nice for the Java people, but does this make it a better programming environment?

[TerryP]

Probably for Google, it may be a better environment. Java is a big thing there AFAIK and obviously there is Android for what that is worth. I could also see Java EE people and students being interested.


Ironically CS, a couple months back I had to deal with someone who was checking his "Java runtime" version over a JS-typo we had, that pissed off IE. First of those I've met...