Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

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Because Typescript eventually won that race? (The race to be a fine, typed and sane counterpart to Javascript).

Somehow Typescript convinced people from the Javascript side of the fence that they could mix both and eventually upgrade from it. While Dart also tried the same feat, it failed doing so.

Nowadays Dart is only being considered to anything because the team behind it are top-notch and implemented themselves a platform where Dart could be the king.

Giving their talent they were able to create a great platform, where they would made even more success if they used Javascript or Typescript as a development language. But giving they wanted to save all their years of work on Dart, and giving its not a bad technology per-se, it just had a adoption problem, Dart lives on Flutter.

If you want to use Flutter go for Dart, but picking Dart to anything outside Flutter will just alienate the developer crowd as giving even Typescript is some sort of a niche language in terms of adoption, nevermind forcing people to learn Dart.

> Because Typescript eventually won that race? (The race to be a fine, typed and sane counterpart to Javascript).

Dart is doing fine, I'm not sure what race you're talking about?

> If you want to use Flutter go for Dart, but picking Dart to anything outside Flutter will just alienate the developer crowd as giving even Typescript is some sort of a niche language in terms of adoption, nevermind forcing people to learn Dart

Dart is incredibly similar to Javascript/Typescript. You can learn it over a weekend + lookups in Google whenever you see a difference.

Your points are extremely weak.

As is the dart type system compared to that of typescript.

Where you were in 2012?

Dart was heavily marketed as a Javascript successor by Google, this was even before ES5 changes, so Javascript was a even weaker language in terms of design, giving people were doing more and more full applications in the language.

The problem is, Javascript did a catch-up, and the Typescript technique of compiling to Javascript made it more appealing as a successor, not mentioning the design of the language (I know that Dart had this too, but having its own JIT it were more appealing in terms of speed back then).

Meanwhile Google abandoned the project that would allow the Dart VM and bindings to WebKit to coexist with V8. And now that only the Dart-to-JS path could be followed to develop for the Web, Typescript championed this path as it was the only way for them from the beggining.

So if you were following those events, you would know what sort of race i was talking about.

I agree with you that "Dart is doing fine", but is only doing so because of Flutter. As in, people learn Dart to target Flutter, not the other way around.

Im not implying that Dart is a bad language, or technology, because thats not true. Its only a problem of adoption, and it will have a hard time outside of the Flutter bubble.

If it were not for Flutter, Dart would continue is path to a slow death, not because its a bad language or technology, but because of how the events turned out to be, and a little bad luck.

Yeah for sure. People didn't want to change from JS to Dart because it's different and they can't adopt the libs they used.

It's absolutely a good language and doing well in Flutter and somewhat outside (I use it outside, but I might be one of the few here).

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