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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

so far ~socially Dart has failed but the language is actually way more interesting than I thought it would ...

Interesting. I’m a fan of Gilads work, and have a strong admiration for Lars Bak who were both involved in 1.0. I followed it cursorily from time to time and thought it looked intriguing. I had a number of colleagues from the Smalltalk industry that went to work on it.

They’ve all left now (I don’t know what Lars’ involvement is anymore?).

But I was curious about Dart for a cross platform app and learned Dart 2.0 and was wholeheartedly let down. I just felt like I was staring at a Java dialect. The “sanctioned” tutorial I watched introduced classes as a “way of organizing code” which I guess could abstractly be said to be true, but IMO misses the mark entirely.

Anyway, I found Dart 2.0 to be very uninteresting. Very safe and traditional and boring. Maybe I need to relook closer to try and see what you’re seeing that I did not.

don't read too much into what I said, I barely read the async/concurrent primitives they made, it felt different and interesting. I came with the impression that it would be a cuter java (like you somehow) but these bits caught my brain by surprise.

> … but IMO misses the mark entirely.

because…?

for example…?

Just curious why it failed...

Because depending on what you want to do, Typescript and Kotlin are better languages with superior tooling, adoption, and community support.

Until recently[0] Dart had pervasive nullability, that is, all types `T` are implicity `Option(T)`. Which in my view was completely unacceptable even in 2011 when it was initially released.

[0]: https://dart.dev/null-safety

So like Java then?

No idea, and I wasn't judging, it's just that on average you'll see 12 languages on articles / news / threads before you see mention of Dart. I heard flutter was solid and quite used but "socially" the mentions are rare.

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