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Comment by d2p | Hacker News Reader

Apologies; it's been so long since I signed up, I didn't realise my username was quite so cryptic. The thread is indeed mine, and I posted it here in the hope that it might be seen by someone on the Dart Team, as there seems to have been no response from Google on this hole :(

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I can assure you that the Dart team reads the mailing list and has almost certainly seen your thread there. I appreciate (and can see) that you honestly want to help Dart succeed, but the title of this thread along with the tone of your comments in the mailing list thread I find to be filled with hyperbole. I don't think calling out the team publicly with a misleading title was the best way to go about helping the language.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm being a dick; but I'm incredibly frustrated to have poured so much effort into trying to make Dart a viable option for a rewrite where I work (I've even been working on a Visual Studio extension since all the devs here are primitively .NET devs).

To find something so fundamental missing with no reasonable solution (and no information from the Dart team) is frustrating; it's not going to make selling Dart to my colleagues any easier.

I'm kind of interested why you considered Dart in the first place.

Google has such a poor track record in language design, that when I was looking for a compile-to-JavaScript language I didn't even consider Dart.

I wrote a blog post some time ago:

http://blog.dantup.com/2014/05/web-development-sucks-and-its...

And while responding to comments, I read a little more about Dart and it started to look quite appealing. I spend too much of my day maintaining and debugging legacy JavaScript written years ago in sub-optimal ways.

Just out of curiosity, what is Google's track record in language design? I don't remember any languages coming from them besides Go and Dart.

There have been two responses from Dart team members to you thread, including myself. Sorry, I was on vacation and stopped responding when you said that I was inventing complexity as an excuse to not solve the problem.

Sorry I didn't identify these; it's rather difficult to know who's on the Dart Team, especially if the profiles aren't linked to profiles. It's rather hard to tell when someone is being a "helpful user" vs someone that actually works on the language.

However, it doesn't change that the complexity being used as an excuse is not being requested. There are many things people would want to do with their deserialisation, and nobody is asking the Dart Team to provide them all. What is really basic, however, is deserialising data into a flat PODO so that we can take advantage of code-completion and static analysis on our code; isolating the mapping problem to a single point.

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