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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

This is a shame that they are losing their jobs. But I can not be surprised at all. Flutter (and Dart) really just never seemed to have a reason to exist, and have not caught any traction.

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I think dart was meant to be used as a JavaScript alternative. Google was working on chrome with dart VM even... But as far as I remember it got abandoned due to pushback from the 'community' due to 'not wanting fragmentation'. Obviously by people who didn't want things changed.

Web is the only place where we don't have an alternative and dart would be a great contender.

People don’t want alternatives because we lived through the IE and flash days. Having a fragmented ecosystem for web makes every project more expensive, difficult to hire for and hard to maintain.

I personally think that the idea of Flutter has a potential in itself (see React Native), but bundling it with Dart makes it a non-starter.

I like Dart. I don't like the quantity of asynchrony I have to fight with to use it, but that's a "modern world" thing and there's little I can do about it. But picking up dart from a C++/Python/Objective-C/Javascript background was dead easy and even occasionally pleasant.

Dart was a good language and it applied what we learned about mobile app dev into a language suited for it. I always thought Java was a clumsy option for mobile dev. It seemed like a good move IMO. There are going to be people resistant to learning new things anyway, and those people would stick with RN (coming from JS/React) or native (coming from Java/native).

Android later took a lot of the learnings from Dart and applied it there. I wouldn't say Flutter was a waste, it was just deprecated because there was little advantage over native Android.

what about Kotlin?

This is a bad take. The concept of bringing one framework to every screen is a great idea. Whether or not the current Flutter framework is perfect is another story.

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