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Comment by Royalaid | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the age of this comment when I came to the thread and it being at the top I kinda brushed it off and scrolled on to the rest of the comments.

It literally looks like astroturffing against dart as a language.

I think this awesome that, even though dart is seeing low adoption, Google is pushing forward and building flutter. The framework and language look like they have a lot of good technical reasons of existing, chief amongst which is native AOT compilation.

Best of luck to the team!

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The reaction here makes me look very positively on Dartlang. At least it hasn't got the fanboy "sun shines out of my new programming language" problem.

The irony is that Dart was co-created by Lars Bak, who is also known for creating Chrome's V8 engine.

Indeed if anyone ever earned the right to make a new language - they did. They were the first to make js really fast and they pulled every trick in the book (from their extensive VM writing experience). But they were ultimately blocked by things like the ability of js objects to change shape. I sympathise with their frustration and from an engineering point of view they did the right thing. They solved the root cause of the problem which was the language.

As somebody who has no dog in the game, I hope this takes off. Javascript and the world of frameworks frankly looks horrible from an outsider's perspective.

> js objects to change shape

Could you please share more details?

http://mrale.ph/blog/2015/01/11/whats-up-with-monomorphism.h...

What languages suffer that problem? Elixir? Rust? Juice?

Putting together this list made me realise how much is not just language, but language + framework / language + architectural pattern.

* Ruby (coupled very strongly with Rails). Around 2007 in particular

* JavaScript when nodejs started becoming a thing, and microservices. The hype!

* Nim

* Clojure(script) went through it on HN, though I could see some of the reasons why it did (and it was muted)

* Can't speak about the functional languages as I've yet to grasp them.

Functional programming is fun, but ML family of languages, especially Haskell, can be very complex if you're not a CS/Maths type. My favourite languages as of now are Emacs Lisp and Ruby (I'm new to Ruby, I like it because it's got a rich ecosystem of libraries and nice, expressive and extensible syntax/paradigms in a clean package; tho I'd probably reach for Django if I had to write a web app, definitely not Rails), and although Haskell is incredibly interesting to play with, writing an actual, complete program with it is practically impossible for me, even if it's small. Just too many things to learn. There definitely is a lot of hype around them, but just for the most part.

Is most of the hype the result of developer “signaling”?

That's my take. Some e.g. Ruby/Rails was due to ppl in other languages (Java?) suddenly seeing how 'easy' web development could be. Many of the others... yeah.

I'm still on that Clojure(Script) hype train TBD. A few years later and I feel like I'm almost where I want to be in terms of productivity.

Prepare for the ReasonML hype train though - which I am also on! :P

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