It's the most open language I know, fully OSS'ed with an extended license to include any implicit patents (removing Patent FUD), developed out in the open and accepting 3rd party contributions and inviting feedback to influence language design.
Lars Bak also mentioned at Google I/O that they're in the process of trying to get it standardized, not sure what's left to do to make it any more "open" and inviting.
http://code.google.com/p/dart/source/list
http://code.google.com/p/closure-compiler/source/list
http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/source/list
Their development is very much insular. That's not to say it's a poor idea to depend on these products, but they don't compare to projects like Python with formal processes for revisions (PEP) or at least some discussion.
It would be nice if Google maintained mirrors on Github and accepted pull requests and such, but I don't see that ever happening.
You said "product", but you should say "project".
If you want to assess the openness of the development process, look at the process itself:
https://code.google.com/p/dart/wiki/Contributing https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...
If code reviews are happening in the open and there's a process to bring new contributors on board, that's a great start. This early in the game, you can't expect random members of the open source community to start contributing more than a dedicated team at Google.
> It would be nice if Google maintained mirrors on Github and accepted pull requests and such, but I don't see that ever happening.
Oh? http://github.com/google https://github.com/dart-lang
Also, FWIW on the Go project we have more than 300 non-Google contributors and a solid core of dedicated committers. https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list
I have to wonder what agenda drives people to claim that this is not "in any way" an open development process.
Actually, external contributors John Evans and Ladislav Thon submitted and landed patches via github.
https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com//10168022 https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com//10166019
Not all of the code is on github but many libraries are. Web ui is developed via github. See here for a full list:
Direction coming from a company that has a goal for the language can be a good thing. Java was an amazing language for a number of years until Sun decided to let it languish.
Dart is under a very open license that anyone can take any part of the language and use it for their own. The website, spec, vm, analyzer, compiler, and editor are all under open and free licenses. If people get fed up with Google's handling of Dart, they can fork it.
I think Java is a great example of why corporate programming languages are a bad thing. Do you remember the first wave of Java adoption? Do you remember how it was adopted in all sorts of places it had no business being because Sun rammed it down everyone's throats through their sales force? The core of Java and the engineering behind the VM are thanks to Gosling, not Sun.
I'm not criticizing Sun here, either. That's just how it was done back then. Sun was positively benevolent compared to the likes of Cincom.
https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/compi...
TypeScript is good that you can transition gradually. I've been using it for the past week and it almost feels like working with Dart with the advantage that's it's just JavaScript. TypeScript interfaces to hundreds of JavaScript libs and jQuery plugins have already been written.
I imagine I'll settle on Dart for some things and TypeScript for others and maybe eventually get them working together.