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Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

The reason was because Google at the time wanted to kill JavaScript and Dart was their weapon.

Around that time Google launched a few “initiatives” to build a “better and more efficient” web. AMP was later but the same spirit and of course all of this was a dystopian nightmare so people got scared and mostly ignored Google.

Dart only exists today as an actively developed language because of Flutter.

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https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/1208618

> "The goal of the Dash effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform. We will proactively evangelize Dash with web developers and all other browser vendors and actively push for its standardization and adoption across the board. This will be a difficult effort requiring finesse and determination, but we are committed to doing everything possible to help it succeed."

The sad thing is, around 2010, most of the JS world (at least JSconf people, which tend to be pretty influential) were interested in Dash as a JS replacement. We were aware of various inconsistencies around typing, Arrays being fancy Objects, the language allowing developers to do weird things rather than warning, type coersion in == etc. There was an appetite for better languages, CoffeeScript was big.

Then they released a 1.0 with zero consultation about what JS developers wanted. Just inflicted by Google as "here's what you'll have". Everyone ignored Dash (and still ignores Dart).

NaCL is another example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

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