Google To Introduce New Programming Language — Dart

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from El Reg: "Google has built a brand-new programming language for 'structured web programming,' one that appears to be suited to browser-based apps. Two of the search giant's engineers will discuss Dart, Google's new language, at the Goto international software development conference next month. News of the new language was posted to the Goto website. There aren't yet any technical details on Dart but the bios of the two Googlers presenting at Goto strongly suggest a bent towards programming for the web and browser."

Comments

Great, another fucking language to learn

[elrous0]

What's that make now, over two dozen different languages for web development, with ludicrous levels of overlap? Great, now things can get even MORE complicated. And, of course, MS and Apple won't adopt it--making it real useful, just as long as all your visitors happen to be using Chrome or some future version of Firefox.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[bill_mcgonigle]

Hey, this could finally be the web language that isn't a kludge or poorly designed. Those other 22 could all go away.

Trouble is, we don't know - this article is a worthless waste of time until it's actually released or detailed.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[knuthin]

Those other 22 could all go away.

https://www.xkcd.com/927/
You think?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

With Google's constant closing of old projects, I'm not going to touch it. Google needs to learn to commit to its projects and not just put them out just to forget about them in a few months.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[bonch]

This is what happens when a tech company gets too big and doesn't know what to focus on. Just like Microsoft used to do, they're releasing pet project after pet project after project, hoping one of them sticks.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

wow someone pissed in your cornflakes this morning...

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[somersault]

I thought Google have been doing this the whole time, ie 20% projects. Nothing wrong with releasing the ones that come to fruition. It's not detracting from other parts of their business, and it's bringing cool stuff into the community - some of which might be really useful. Google are one of the companies that actually has a chance of making a replacement to JS "stick", though convincing MS would be a very tall order indeed.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/585/

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like this one?
http://www.python.org/

Ok, I know they didn't invent it, but they do now employ Guido and use it extensively enough inhouse they're always going to want to support it.

With any luck Dart'll be popular enough inhouse that they won't want to or be able to shut it down because of how many things use it.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[hcs_$reboot]

And, of course, MS and Apple won't adopt it

If the Dart language is intended to replace something like the buggy, slow and badly designed PHP language, I'm likely to give it a try.
In other terms, if Dart is to PHP what Chrome is to Firefox, that new language sounds promising.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[VGPowerlord]

If the Dart language is intended to replace something like the buggy, slow and badly designed PHP language,

I was rather hoping it was intended to replace the buggy, slow (although progress has been made), and badly designed ECMAScript language, which you may also know as JavaScript.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[obarthelemy]

I can fuck in all languages !

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has been doing this ever since Google Search.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAH!!! That xkcd get's them every time.

*wipes tear from eye*

wooohoo!

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[hedronist]

Python is not a good example to make this point. Google did not start the Python project, and Python has lots of uses that have nothing to do with Google. If Google were to fold tomorrow, Python (and Guido) would survive just fine.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[TheRaven64]

Not to mention the fact that Google has migrated a lot of their internal code away from Python over the last few years...

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Fujisawa Sensei]

We already have a language like that, its called 'C'.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you actually complaining about?

If it's the same as all other languages, it'll die.
If it's worse, it'll die.
If it's better, it's worth learning and adopting, and other technologies will be replaced.

Rather than moaning about the world in your comfy sofa, how about getting up and have a sense of curiosity, damn it.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[rmstar]

If the Dart language is intended to replace something like the buggy, slow and badly designed PHP language, I'm likely to give it a try.

Well, it is not as if there weren't any alternatives before.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I wouldn't compare Firefox to PHP. PHP is a hot circle of garbage; Firefox may be slower than Chrome and not be as advanced, but it did a lot more for the web than PHP. Tools like Firebug and all of the other awesome extensions gave a lot to the design of Chrome.

IE is more akin to PHP.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Tumbleweed]

We already have a language like that, its called 'C'.

Yeah, but C is too C-like for most people's taste.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[SleazyRidr]

Which reminds me of this: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2420678&cid=37352064

Ok that was a bit harsh: he only beat you by one minute...

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit like Apple then.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[element-o.p.]

I'll admit that it's kind of a PITA when you start playing with something Google offers only to find it's about to be discontinued. On the other hand, I can see it from Google's point of view, too. They are an innovative company. When they come up with an idea that they think has potential (for example, App Inventor), they release it to see if it takes off. You can't blame them, though, for deciding to pull the projects that didn't see enough interest to be worth maintaining. While I don't know if the data supports this interpretation of App Inventor's demise, I seem to recall it getting pretty thoroughly dismissed here on /.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because C forces you to actually think about what you're doing, most people don't like that.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Artraze]

I love C, but as a web application language... It ain't great. If only because web development is where programers when they can't comprehend C.
> trollface, in b4 flamebait, etc

In all seriousness, though, C is a very general language to use for sure a relatively specific task. (As the difficultly of string handling vs the prevalence of string handling in web development make it particularly unsuitable.) A language specifically designed for the task, as designed well (I'm looking at you PHP!) would be welcome.

Really, though, I just hope it's not a framework. I find frameworks just make life so much harder for no real reason aside from, I guess, hiding how the web actually works and replacing it with an even more convoluted "object model" or such crap. Occasionally helpful, but for how infrequent that is I'd rather just handle the requests and print out the result myself, thanks.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

An Atheist voting Republican is like a Jew voting for Hitler.

An Atheist voting Democrat is like a Jew voting for Ahmadinejad.

Fixed those typos in your sig for ya

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[element-o.p.]

Yes, but no.

I took a course that discussed personality profiles a little while back, and -- according to this class, at least -- the "creative" types tend to get really excited about a project, work on it for a little while, lose interest and abandon it in favor of the next project that comes to mind. This is a pretty good description of me, as my wife is fond of reminding me. I have a million things that I've started, gotten bored with and abandoned. A friend of mine once commented that techies seem to be borderline ADD; this theory could explain why. Whether you like Google or not, you have to admit they are pretty creative. If they have a culture that is lead by the creative, ADD types, you would kind of expect them to display this type of behaviour. The solution to this problem is to hire analytical/admin types who will drive the projects to completion rather than abandoning them when they get the next creative spark.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[element-o.p.]

Solo doesn't count.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Ash Vince]

If the Dart language is intended to replace something like the buggy, slow and badly designed PHP language,

I was rather hoping it was intended to replace the buggy, slow (although progress has been made), and badly designed ECMAScript language, which you may also know as JavaScript.

JavaScript is not actually that bad compared to PHP. I know it can be used to create a complete mess, but in the hands of a competent developer it can be used to produce a decent end result.

PHP on the other hand seems to have hit a wall recently. I have to admit though I am a little jaded at the moment after a recent project exposing an existing PHP web application via web services. PHP has truly awful WSDL support, even if you try using the Zend Framework addons. Since more and more projects seem to involve some level of interworking with other systems that fact that PHP fail so badly in this regard is pretty inexcusable.

Just to explain why I am so jaded and not at all as a cathartic experience I am probably now going to rant about some of the issues :)

Firstly, the SOAP functions built into the latest verion of PHP only support rpc/literal WSDL. Since every other platform (.NET, JAVA, Axis2) wants document/literal this makes PHP only useful for talking to PHP.

Then you think Zend Framework might be better. Unfortunately although this lets you generate and expose WSDL2 files using document/literal, you cannot use them as a basis for your service. This means that you can't actually let anyone talk to the service without some awful compatibility layer that translates what a rpc/literal service would expect into document/literal by doing some crazy unravelling of arrays of parameters.

And then when you finally think you are done you discover there is a bug that means booleans are just broken and always get returned as false. You file a bug report but it looks like the maintainer of this part of the Zend Framework has died as he hasn't been on their bug tracker for months.

So I might have worked round all these issues and delivered a working service but it took far longer than expected and that costs money. For a server side language that is supposed to be an established heavy weight this is not acceptable. It's enough to make you learn .NET :)

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it sad that I don't even have to click that link to know what is behind it?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Captain Splendid]

This is what happens when a tech company gets too big and doesn't know what to focus on. Just like Microsoft used to do, they're releasing pet project after pet project after project, hoping one of them sticks.

Yeah but at least they don't release them as finished products and charge $$$ for them..

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

The Democrats do actually elect representatives who aren't Christians.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

We already have a language like that, its called 'C'.

Why not assembly? C is a very minor step up from a good macro assembler. It's great for embedded work, DSP work (audio, video, etc), device drivers, and kernels but it seriously sucks ass for nearly everything else.

The big problem with C is not "too much thinking." That's the favorite strawman used against people who cirticize C. The real problems with C are that it's hopelessly verbose and the standard library sucks.

If you can't bring yourself to live under a virtual machine then check out one of the modern compiled languages. There are a ton of them. Haskell, D, Go, Ocaml,Lisp, ML, ...

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[jacksinn]

And now you can get Mono!

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[sourcerror]

So you want a new language because you're unhappy with the php libraries?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[gv250]

This is what happens when a tech company gets too big and doesn't know what to focus on.

It seems to me that 3M and Xerox, among other companies, made a decent living releasing pet project after pet project.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP is not actually that bad compared to JavaScript. I know it can be used to create a complete mess, but in the hands of a competent developer it can be used to produce a decent end result.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[catbutt]

And, of course, MS and Apple won't adopt it--making it real useful, just as long as all your visitors happen to be using Chrome or some future version of Firefox.

So make it compile to Javascript for browsers that don't support it natively.

Personally I think it would be pretty sweet if Google made V8 support Coffescript natively, both in Chrome and Node.js. But if they were also to build in some of what they've got with Closure, they've got something.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[SteveFoerster]

If it is, we're sad together.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[elrous0]

C forces you to actually think about sticking a gun in your mouth and eating a bullet rather than spending one more second coding C

FTFY

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[AmberBlackCat]

I don't see any real issues with PHP. Anything it lacks seems to be insignificant for the inner workings of a webpage.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[neoform]

A single library has you hating the entire language?

PHP is fast, easy to develop on, widely supported and very well documented...

Yeah, you can make shit PHP code (and there's a lot of shit programmers out there), but that doesn't make PHP bad.

Can you name me an alternative to PHP that is as easy to work with, that is equally powerful and does not require a dedicated machine to run, or root access (as a web service)?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read that in the voice of Sylvester Stallone.

As did you just now.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, assembly is so much more intuitive and useful than C or C variants.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[sycodon]

Already H.R. reps are looking for people with at least 1 year "in depth" experience in DART

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[BagOBones]

That's because C forces you to actually think about what you're doing, most people don't like that.

C is like building a house by hand without any power tools, or hiring anyone else to do specialized tasks.. Then furnishing it with custom built furniture or stuff from IKEA.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[icebraining]

'Easy to work with' is subjective. For the rest: Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, Go and a few others.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[johncandale]

they are not innovative. They hire 10,000 Eager beavers and they throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. This is a horrible way to get a product to market. You need early adaptions followed by mass adaption, and, very sad to say, you need some marketing. You really need to pick and choose your products, and only put effort in the the very best ones. They haven't really made more then 3-4 innovative products, everything else was just a better funded, better branded copy of something else.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[johncandale]

there is everything wrong with it. No one wants to back a project when it has the perception of a pet product. Examples might include, Mozilla, Microsoft, apple, not wanting to spend development cycles adding function in a very fast market; Even more then that thou is the companies not wanting to port their wed app products to new code, hiring/training new people. Start-in-your basement style companies don't want to spend the time either. Because it's a pet product. So even if it is a great product, it won't get adapted from your track record of the last 50 failed ones you canceled or didn't support or push to get adapted. There is sort of a window for new products like this, you need people to sign up for them mentally so you need company backing to market, and polish the image of the product, Like how every new apple product update is treated like a new form of gold. Like how Steve Jobs spend _10 minutes_ in the product launch keynote talking about how they added folders to iOS, like it was a revolution. Just releasing products into the wild gives your brand a bad image.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[shutdown -p now]

So long as those pet projects are interesting and/or useful for me personally, I don't see anything wrong with that (but then I'm not their shareholder).

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[shutdown -p now]

It's not that it lacks something - the latest releases seem to be reasonably feature-complete. It's that the easiest way to do something in PHP is usually also the wrong way to do it, for legacy design reasons (and, of course, most people using it aren't aware of it).

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[GeodesicGnome]

Yeah, I hear Cobol and Fortran are going away any decade now.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

this makes PHP only useful for talking to PHP.

Wrong. We were able to use soaps simple (which is a good thing) soap interface to write a fully fledged vsphere management wrapper.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember Bob?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[johnsnails]

Excuse my ignorance but isn't it the republicans who would be electing Christian representatives? or r u joking around?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[goosesensor]

Where are all the C++ jokes?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[jmcvetta]

Damn I wish I had mod points...

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[cavreader]

Google is an advertising and marketing company who create technology advances to support their primary business model. And they do not open source or share any specifics relating to the key technologies that actually give them an edge over their competition. Things like their database technology, specialized OS kernels, and custom CPU chip designs.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

That's "aren't" Christian. In the 2006 election, Democrats elected 2 Buddhists to the House.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[t2t10]

" JavaScript is not actually that bad compared to PHP."

In the same sense that "cancer is actually not that bad compared to smallpox"?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they are, what's the problem with that?

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

xkcd get's them

"gets".

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAH!!! That xkcd get's them every time.

It 'sure doe's, nigger

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

... and Indians are already applying.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[neoform]

Saving the file and hitting reload in your browser, that's easy to work with.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[f()rK()_Bomb]

Didn't google release bigtable and mapreduce and google filesystem papers? That was some pretty huge technology. MapReduce is part of Apache Hadoop. Also, what custom cpu's do they use. I was under the impression google uses entirely off the shelf parts and does everything in software.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[cavreader]

They did release Level DB under a BSD license but it only uses the same basic non-sql database principles and methodologies but it does not contain the same Google functionality or capabilities that they actually use.

Re:Great, another fucking language to learn

[SomeStupidNickName12]

umm... You know modern day java web frameworks support that as well? Its called hot-deploy - save and reload the browser.

PHP has zero benefits over some of the modern day java web frameworks. Speed of development, maintainability, scalability. Hell when you start comparing it to ASPX/.net, Ruby on Rails, Python - PHP has zero benefits over any modern web frameworks.

please please please

[Anonymous Coward]

tell me that this will replace Javascript.

If it does PHP too that would be a bonus.

Granted I don't know if this will actually be any better -- and given Google's reported hostility to good programming languages I'd need some good experience with it to decide -- but God knows it can't be any worse.

Re:please please please

[John Courtland]

Can you discuss why you don't like JS? I personally like JS (coffeescript more so), and would like to hear your thoughts on the language.

Re:please please please

[lynnae]

I got this link from my twitter feed, based on the assumption that Dart is Dash renamed.

http://markmail.org/message/uro3jtoitlmq6x7t

So there's hope.

As for why one wouldn't be estatic over javascript, there are many good reasons in that email, many others in The Good Parts book.

There's always room for something better, while not denegrating the existing.

Re:please please please

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Because not liking JS makes you look cool?

I take the Stephen Stills' approach to programming language: If you can't be with your dream programming language, just use the one you're with. :)

Re:please please please

[ArhcAngel]

Can you discuss why you feel the need to ask an AC to elaborate or why you would "like" hearing the thoughts of an AC on something?

Re:please please please

[MagikSlinger]

I'm not AC, but I can opine about this. The Javascript language, not too much problem. Enclosures grabbing any variable in scope and keeping them around is a major pain. That's all. The API of Browsers: Oh, my complaints are legion, but that's not really about Javascript anymore than the Win32 API is about C/C++. I wonder if AC is complaining about the browser API and not the language?

Re:please please please

[John Courtland]

Cause I like javascript and I wanna hear why others don't?

Re:please please please

[Oligonicella]

If PHP is passe, then why can you embed it in HTML code via Ice? What would be the point?

Re:please please please

[TheRaven64]

A few things, off the top of my head:

• Brace insertion.
• Poor scoping rules.
• Completely insane constructor semantics trying to look a bit like Java in a prototype-based language (new foo() calls foo() with this set to a new copy of foo.prototype. WTF?)
• Lack of weak references (makes it really hard to write nontrivial code that doesn't leak)
• Poor numerical support (everything is a double - no integer types)
• Everything is an object... except that sometimes it isn't, although it pretends to be.
• Arrays that look like dictionaries but aren't... except when they are (e.g. someArray[1] and someArray["foo"] do completely unrelated things)

There are probably other reasons to dislike JavaScript. Putting Self in a browser would have been a lot better than this crappy cut-down Self clone with Java syntax that we ended up with.

Re:please please please

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a good discussion: Javascript is well and truly the poor man's 'programming' language, scripted by legions of feckless web developers who wouldn't know a line of assembler, a cache miss, data orientated programming, a GPU or even the most basic concept of mathematics if it hit them in their out of scope or maybe not face. Instead, they choose - either through stupidity or ignorance, to create useless web 'apps' and join the crowd of retards headed by Google and the like who believe that barfing everything up into The Cloud is the right way to go about things. There is nothing fast about Javascript, it's lack of typing is unfathomable and trying to debug it is a complete and utter nightmare. Yet, inexplicably, it still exists, and people actually create extensions to it, and discuss ways of optimising scripts written in it. If Javascript were a car, it would be a Rover Metro complete with dump valves, spoiler and a 16 year old delinquent in track suit bottoms at the wheel.

Re:please please please

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the AC you're responding to but I'll gladly list some of the faults of Javascript:

• Dynamic, weak typing sucks.
• Automatic semi-colon insertion is both a stupid idea and implemented in a completely retarded way.
• The scoping rules are bad.
• It supports octal numeric literals in an incredibly error-prone way (080 is 80, 070 is 56).
• The === operator is not ==.
• It has both undefined and null.
• You can redefine undefined.
• No support for namespaces.

Re:please please please

[Tanktalus]

Enclosures grabbing any variable in scope and keeping them around is a major pain.

I've been doing perl now for a while (~10 years or so). And closures grabbing any variable in scope (that is actually mentioned inside the closure) is a godsend. I can't imagine another way. That sounds like a feature, not a pain. (As to your other points, I don't do JS/ECMAscript, so I can't speak to them.)

Re:please please please

[The Moof]

Off the top of my head, I would say because it's got some language flaws (goofy typing, pseudo object design patterns). However, the primary reason JavaScript makes me cringe is because the majority of web designers I come across throw usability as far out the window as they can because they do something mind-blowingly stupid. Stuff like this:

<a href="#" onclick="location.href='somepage.html';return false;">Linky</a>

Another one I see is not using method="get" on a form, and instead having a link that runs JavaScript that literally builds a url of name=value pairs of the form fields. Bonus points when they forget to properly encode the values.

Granted, most of my gripes come from bad designers, and aren't actual shortcomings of JavaScript itself.

Re:please please please

[MagikSlinger]

And closures grabbing any variable in scope (that is actually mentioned inside the closure) is a godsend.

Referenced by your closure is a good thing, but Javascript grabs every variable in scope and makes it available inside your closure leading to unpleasant memory leaks galore.

Re:please please please

[GameboyRMH]

I can tell you've replaced a few vacuum tubes in your time.

Re:please please please

[John Courtland]

Hahaha ok buddy, go tell that to the folks who wrote node.js or couchdb.

Re:please please please

[John Courtland]

The first is subjective... there are plenty of good things about dynamic weak typing.
ASI is garbage... and you're right so I personally don't use it.
I haven't been bit by scoping rules too many times, I think that's mostly because I don't write JS like it's C or Java.
I honestly never ever use octal. Either decimal or hex. That is a valid gripe but a small one.
The === vs == operator thing is dumb, but hardly as dumb as PHP's situation, and honestly in all the lines of JS I've written, I've never had to use ===.
Dumb but a small issue.
Dumb as well, but easily mitigated by not doing it.
You can poor-man's namespace. It's not as elegant as Java's or C++'s namespaces, but plenty of people manage to make it work.

Re:please please please

[sourcerror]

You need 3rd party libraries to clone an object.

Re:please please please

[Raenex]

Cause I like javascript and I wanna hear why others don't?

I speak as somebody who came from a Java background when I first look at JavaScript. It just felt like a toy language, and I think the main things were no static typing and lack of support for things like namespaces.

Granted, there's a big divide between the dynamic typing and static typing folks, so some of it is a matter of preference.

Re:please please please

[Anonymous Coward]

there are plenty of good things about dynamic weak typing.

Such as...?

Re:please please please

[nschubach]

Completely insane constructor semantics trying to look a bit like Java in a prototype-based language (new foo() calls foo() with this set to a new copy of foo.prototype. WTF?)

It's not necessary to deal with those all the time though... Check out "JavaScript: The Good Parts" sometime. He covers methods to write your code so that you never touch .prototype after making a "method helper". (And there's really no need to use '.constructor' or 'new'.)

The rest seems like personal preference to me.

Re:please please please

[shutdown -p now]

Cause I like javascript and I wanna hear why others don't?

Global-by-default-unless-declared for variables is a recipe of disaster.

Scoping rules are fubar. If I declare a "var" inside a pair of curly braces, it should only be visible in those curly braces - not outside of them, and most certainly not before the line it is declared at! Every other curly brace family language which has explicit variable declaration does it that way, but not JS.

Syntax for lambdas is overly verbose - not only there's no expression form, so you have to write "return"; but "function" itself is 5 chars longer than it should have been. This is annoying in any type of code where lambdas are heavily used, such as when using map/filter/... chains, or Node.js style async programming with explicit continuations.

"new Boolean(false)" is considered true in a conditional expression. Yes I know it's just a corner case of a simple general rule, but it shows how silly the rule is in the first place - either make it "just work", or else forbid using object references in conditionals in the first place.

While we're at it, what's up with the whole separation into primitives and objects? For Java it made a little sense because of perf concerns, but for JS it makes none. Python and Ruby have demonstrated how a dynamically typed language can have a true single-root hierarchy for all types, including primitives, without sacrificing perf (tagged pointers FTW). Coincidentally, that's why the previous point is not an issue in Python - there's no Boolean object type separate from the primitive type there because there's no need for it - the primitive is an object type.

JS standard library is very limited. When you can do less that ANSI C standard library out of the box, that's sad.

Re:please please please

[shutdown -p now]

Lack of weak references (makes it really hard to write nontrivial code that doesn't leak)

Is this only an issue in JS implementations that use reference-counting - i.e. old IE versions?

For that matter, isn't being unable to garbage-collect cyclic graphs non-standard-compliant?

Re:please please please

[bmuon]

Global-by-default-unless-declared for variables is a recipe of disaster.

ES5 strict mode already disallows that.

If I declare a "var" inside a pair of curly braces, it should only be visible in those curly braces

The "let" keyword will fix that. It has block scope. Eventually all variables should be declared with "let".

Syntax for lambdas is overly verbose

There is still no agreement in the ECMAScript comitee about which option to take, but there are two very good proposals:
- Arrow function syntax taken from CoffeeScript: (x) -> x * x;
- Block lambdas, which allow you to treat chunks of code as data
Personally, I love arrow functions.

"new Boolean(false)" is considered true in a conditional expression..

I never heard of that particular example and trying "true == new Boolean(false)" always evaluates to false in a console. But yes, the == type coercing operand is the worst part of JavaScript. The === operator solves 99% of cases. For the 1% that it doesn't help with, ECMAScript 6 will have an "is" operator, and before that probably an Object.is() function.

While we're at it, what's up with the whole separation into primitives and objects?

I agree with you, everything should've been an object from the start. That's probably because of the Java legacy.

Re:please please please

[shutdown -p now]

I never heard of that particular example and trying "true == new Boolean(false)" always evaluates to false in a console.

That's why I mentioned a conditional expression. Try:

if (new Boolean(false)) document.write("epic fail");

As for the rest of it, the key word in all your replies is "will". Yes, I know a lot of it is being treated for EcmaScript vNext, but we're talking about what's available for use today (and, realistically, one can't just stick to Mozilla alone and use their extensions - we'll have to wait for the standard, at least for an implementable draft, and then for browsers to pick it up). And today, these are are still issues - the fact that changes are considered for the next language version is a proof of that.

The other problem is that, even once the changes are there, existing semantics would still remain for the sake of back-compat, and will provide a source of perpetual confusion for newcomers, and plenty of opportunity to write bad code. I'd expect most people to pick "var" over "let" for declaring variables, for example, just because "var" is the more obvious construct. And then they'll run into scoping issues, esp. with lambdas...

It's the exact same problem that C++ is facing. Most of the recent (STL and after) additions are good, but there's lots of old cruft there dating back to ARM C++ and K&R C. And they can't just throw it out of the language.

Maybe they need to come up with some kind of "use sanity" mode to build on the existing "use strict", that would kill all existing garbage in the language. Then we could set a simple regex commit filter to check that it's always there, and call it a day.

Personally, I love arrow functions.

Given that Oracle has just settled on using arrow syntax for their lambdas in Java 8, I hope that JS will follow. That way we'll at least get some syntactic unification over curly-braces family, what with C#, Scala and C++ all using arrow for that already.

Re:please please please

[bmuon]

Maybe they need to come up with some kind of "use sanity" mode to build on the existing "use strict",

That's the idea. You'll be able to set "application/ecmascript-6" or something similar to the type attribute of the script tag.

I think in the context of a discussion related to a (not even published) new language that aims to fix front-end development, the future of JavaScript is more relevant than its present.

Re:please please please

[shutdown -p now]

I think in the context of a discussion related to a (not even published) new language that aims to fix front-end development, the future of JavaScript is more relevant than its present.

That's true. And somehow I don't see Apple or Microsoft racing to implement whatever Google has to offer in IE and Safari, respectively - which would pretty much kill the idea on the spot. Sure, they can compile to JS - they even say so explicitly - but there's no shortage of languages doing just that already, and it didn't really help them take over JS as the language for the web.

Pragmatically, I do realize that JS is most likely the high-level programming language for the next decade. Especially now that it (and HTML) is essentially the only way to write portable apps between desktops and all major mobile platforms. And then consider Win8, where "apps should be writable in HTML5/JS" is an explicit design goal - if you're a JS developer, you really should watch the presentations on BUILD come September 13th, there will be a lot of relevant goodness there. And I don't think that Google is suddenly going to de-invest on their major push for HTML5 as the development platform for "Google connected experience", either, at least definitely not short-term.

Which is why it's good that stuff is being fixed, and that all implementations (finally also including IE - well, better late than never) are striving to catch up on conformance, and actively competing on perf. Still, I wish that a better designed language would be the base of all these efforts - it would save us a lot of time on fixing things, which could then be used to improve it in other areas. Python in that role would have been awesome.

Re:please please please

[TheRaven64]

No, it's a problem with any collector. A tracing collector still needs a mechanism for breaking cycles. It can collect garbage cycles, where two objects reference each other but neither is referenced anywhere else, but that's a less common case. For example, consider a notification delivery object. This is a pretty common pattern - objects register to receive notifications of a particular type, then other objects send notifications and the notification centre routes them to any interested objects. The notification centre needs to keep a reference to the objects that are interested in notifications, but this should be a weak reference because the object should be collected if that's the only reference to it.

Re:please please please

[lsatenstein]

My Favourite language is APL (Check out apl360 and the book by Gilman and Rose)

Standards

[jaf1230]

http://xkcd.com/927/ Nuff said.

Re:Standards

[woboyle]

As one wag said, "The nice thing about standards, is that there are so many." and "The nice thing about standards, is that everyone has one."...

"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart"

[Anonymous Coward]

"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart"

Stopped reading there.

Goto conference--awesome name...

[datajerk]

Goto conference--awesome name for a programming conference. However, their logo: "goto;" is a bit confusing, where are we going? Perhaps I should be reading it as "goto conference;".

Re:Goto conference--awesome name...

[Rizimar]

What's worse is when I plug it into my GPS, there are so many intermediary stops and detours that the Goto map looks like a bunch of spaghetti!

Re:Goto conference--awesome name...

[Anonymous Coward]

"gosubs nested 20 deep conference" was taken

Re:Goto conference--awesome name...

[dkleinsc]

I'm not sure it's such a great name. In the immortal words of Edsger Dijkstra, "Goto considered harmful".

Re:Goto conference--awesome name...

[zill]

Goto
Go Two
It's Go version 2.0, dur.

Re:Goto conference--awesome name...

[shutdown -p now]

In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds,

"You've been brainwashed by CS people who thought that Niklaus Wirth actually knew what he was talking about ... He [Dijkstra] is dead, and we shouldn't talk ill of the dead. So these days I can only rant about Niklaus Wirth"

Re:"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart

[MightyMartian]

Pretty much. What's there to say? Until there are details, all we know is that Google has a language called Dart.

Go

[Idimmu Xul]

Did anyone really start using the last language they used, Go?

Re:Go

[Lexx Greatrex]

Shudder... Go was an epic fail.

Re:Go

[Lexx Greatrex]

Shudder... Go was an epic fail.

http://lexxical.universeii.com/2009/11/googles-new-language-go-please-stop.html was the link I forgot to post.

Re:Go

[Karl J. Smith]

Yes. For example, Heroku is using it (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/), and you can also use Google App Engine with Go - http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/overview.html

Re:Go

[toxonix]

I don't think Go stuck to the wall they threw it at. Or else there was no wall, and it was thrown into the void. This is standard operating procedure at Google. Throw something at the wall (or a wall) and see if it sticks.

Re:Go

[MimeticLie]

Your article was an epic fail. Who needs an well reasoned, well articulated argument when you can just repeat statements from Google verbatim and slap a "You Decide" title over them? I knew nothing about Go before reading it, and I know even less now. Well done.

Re:Go

[Oligonicella]

So, we have a language developed for one, single person?

Re:Go

[sgt scrub]

I wanted to use it but I can't find any ssl library or examples for it. The language syntax is easy, I write python and C++, and it is distributed by nature. I got the impression it was Erlang for those that don't want to poke out their eyes reading their own code. Anyway, a language designed specifically for distributed applications without an ssl library, IMHO, is useless.

Re:Go

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to take those criticisms seriously when the author describes Java as dynamically typed. Java is pretty much the poster child for strongly/statically typed languages and owes its plethora of tooling to this fact.

Re:Go

[cababunga]

Exactly. I stopped reading right at that sentence.

Re:Go

[Anonymous Coward]

Google uses Go internally for a bunch of server-side stuff; they released it mostly for the hell of it.

Re:Go

[Lexx Greatrex]

This is a blog, not an article written to journalistic standards. If your ire is an objection to what you perceive as "Google-bashing", then I assure you that my commentary is solely based on the merits of the Go language as I perceive them though my filter of 30 years experience as a programmer.

Re:Go

[Anonymous Coward]

try http://golang.org/pkg/crypto/tls/

Re:Go

[UtterCoward]

Journalistic standards or not, it is absolutely hilarious that you conclude your blog post with this: "I must admit to being gobsmacked by the blatant lack of experience evident in the design decisions made by this small team..." If you are gobsmacked by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike's lack of experience then I suppose C must be about a useful as LOGO?

Re:Go

[Wee]

That blog post was epic fail.

-B

Re:Go

[Anonymous Coward]

Go for App Engine was only just released in July. Here's a video on Writing Web Apps in Go from Google I/O 2011.

They're still fleshing out some of the APIs used for cloud apps, and that seems to be Google's focus for Go. Of course anyone could use Go for just about anything, but you may run into limited supporting libraries. For example, I wanted timezone stuff for my test app that would have been easily available in Python and wasn't available for Go.

The language itself is really fun if you're a C programmer.

Re:Go

[Lexx Greatrex]

With all due respect to the learned individuals in question (to whom I have a great deal of admiration) the very point of the article is to point out that the Go language seems to have not benefited from some of the hard-earned experience of recent decades. A programmer experienced in C and its descendants C++, Java and C# for example, will have a personal litany of the good and bad things about the languages in question. I,for example, consider the generics of C++, Java and C# to be an improvement; while I also maintain that the multiple-inheritance of C++ was a mistake that was eventually remedied in languages like Java. Every programmer has his or her own take such things; but on some things there is broad consensus. Ubiquitous in post-C languages, inheritance, strong typing, assertions and exceptions are considered vital aspects of modern programming by such a broad consensus that they have become almost axiomatic. To dismiss such collective wisdom with remarks such as "programmers use these [assertions] as a crutch to avoid thinking about proper error handling and reporting" belies disregard or even ignorance of the hard-won experience of the decades since C was invented. This is the point the article and also of my post.

Re:Go

[icebraining]

I'm learning it right now and I find it wonderful. Static duck typing, hmm....

Re:Go

[icebraining]

as I perceive them though my filter of 30 years experience as a programmer.

Yes, but have you used it? Written more than a few dozen lines in it? I mean, your item "no exception handling" isn't true, there's panic() and recover() for that. It's right there in the language tutorial.

Re:Go

[Tablizer]

My "Go" got up and went.

Re:Go

[shutdown -p now]

I agree on some points and not others. One advice, though, is that you should get your terminology in order. For example:

"No static inheritance"

It's not clear what this means at all. In the context of the comment, presumably "inheritance" should actually mean "subtyping" (they are not the same thing in general, even though they often go hand-to-hand in strict OOP languages). But if so, it is plainly wrong - Go still has static subtyping, it's just structural and not nominal - i.e. whether a type is a subtype of an interface is still decided at compile-time at the point where conversion takes place, but rather than doing a lookup by name in the list of implemented interfaces, it matches the members of the interface against the members of the type. It's not a new thing, either - e.g. Objective Caml has a similar arrangement (albeit much better formalized, with inline notation for such structural types, and full type inference to boot). C++ ad-hoc polymorphism in templates is also not dissimilar.

Re:Go

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I did. So at least they developed the language for at least two people ;-)

That said, I wrote a ~25.000 LOC project in Go and was truly amazed by the language. A competing group worked on a roughly identical project but uses C++. They are still nowhere near our level of completion. Not everybody may like Go, but for my purpose it really served its promise of productivity.

Another programming language?

[Tei]

A new programming language create a huge problem, before start solving anything. And its that you lose all the work done with libraries. Everything. A new language is like a natural disaster that wipe civilization to the caves again.

People is doing a lot of cool stuff with Javascript. JS is starting to becoming a decent enough language to write code for the web!.
http://jquerysbestfriends.com/#slide1

Re:Another programming language?

[Synerg1y]

So you wannabe coders keep saying, all of javascript is documented on google searches, its so easyyy to copy paste those functions and input your own field names and just seem them work. Trace tools for the browser make it even easier, they work for EVERYBODY since its client side. Wanna input your SSN into a jscript page while your browser is compromised with spyware? Identity theft would reach a whole new level then, hackers wouldn't even have to try, your only protection is your browser, not a corporate security team, I'm sure all of you can handle that no problem right (masters required min or 1337)?

Seriously stop pitching this band aid language as a solve all, it wasn't designed for, it isn't being designed to become such, nor are the security holes even meant be fixed, the language just isn't mean to work for anything serious and how long do you go on the web without logging into something or giving out other personal information?

Re:Another programming language?

[Anonymous Coward]

My prediction is that this IS a JS server akin to Node. My guess is that it uses Google's V8 JS engine, just like Node. Why? Well, one of the engineers worked on V8 as well. Dart implies fast. V8 is fast. It kinda all fits together...

Re:Another programming language?

[defaria]

Not really. Languages have been known to have the ability to call libraries written in other languages. Have you not heard of this?!?

Re:Another programming language?

[Tei]

Node.js is awesome.
Theres even something that work like apt-get to install new libraries and apps. Stuff like FilePad make me go :-OOOOOOOOO

Re:Another programming language?

[Tei]

Javascript need not promoting. Is the standard language to write on the web, you can't use anything else even if you want.

What you could do, is write Javascript with Lips, C++ or VB styles. It will still be Javascript, but it can look like C++ or C or VB if you want to.

Life for webmasters used to be miserable, back then, with IE6 and Netscape 4.61.

Re:Another programming language?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the most annoying website layout I've seen in a while, thanks for that

Re:Another programming language?

[kwerle]

I'll take a language that has strong support for subclassing, thanks.

People are doing some cool stuff with javascript - but I think it's in spite of the language, not because of it.

(claimer: I have to deal with JS every day)

Re:Another programming language?

[Oligonicella]

"Seriously stop pitching this band aid language as a solve all, it wasn't designed for..."

That's what ya call a straw argument. No one claims it solves all. In fact, anyone claiming one language is a 'solves all' isn't thinking deeply enough.

But his point is good. There is an absolute shit-load of good quality JS code in libraries and it is not quite as simple as simply renaming stuff. A display can be reached using two incompatible approaches making the integration into your application code interesting to say the least.

Re:Another programming language?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Writing glue code is not much fun, though.

Re:Another programming language?

[jc42]

So you wannabe coders keep saying, all of javascript is documented on google searches, its so easy to copy paste those functions and input your own field names and just seem them work.

Well, I've lately been experimenting with HTML5 canvases, which involves a lot of JS, and I've found that it isn't always quite that easy. Yes, there are zillions of examples that do cute things in a canvas. But they all seem to be made up of lots of hard-coded numbers that aren't explained anywhere in any coherent fashion. So to use them to draw your figures, you spend long hours tweaking the numbers, trying to grok what the relation might be between the numbers and what appears on the screen.

Similarly, there's lots of online HTML5 docs on zillions of sites, but it all seems to involve "handwaving", i.e., it describes what's going on in a "10-km view" fashion, using lots of undefined terms. When you try googling those terms, you find that you're searching through millions of ghits that are mostly about totally unrelated topics that happen to use the same words (with different meanings).

So you try asking in a forum. And you find that there are zillions of HTML5 forums, each of which has maybe 2 or 5 messages per month, and the people (or person ;-) there are oh-so-friendly, but don't quite know how to answer your question. You try asking in multiple forums, and it takes forever, due to the fact that people don't like usenet any more; they prefer zillions of forums, each of which has its own GUI that takes days to learn to use effectively.

The "cargo cult" (google it) approach to web programming is widespread. But it can be a recipe for a very long, slow, drawn-out process of coming to some partial understanding of WTF is going on in the code that doesn't quite do what you need, and responds bizarrely to tiny tweaks. Getting downloaded code to do what you need done can take up a rather large chunk of your lifespan. And you are forever plagued by bugs due to your lack of understanding what it does in cases that you haven't tested.

The only way to produce code that actually works correctly is to understand (in every detail, to the bit level) all the things you're working with. Cut-and-paste sounds like a useful idea, but it's much of the reason for the widespread coding disasters that we're plagued with.

Learning to use "New! Improved!" Web tools has a history of being a lot like swimming in molasses. The intro examples look cool, but doing anything even slightly different from the examples tends to lead you down a maze of twisted passages, all alike. So there are reasons to be skeptical of this one, until we've seen some evidence of what it's like, and how much of a time sinkhole learning it will be.

Re:Another programming language?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take a language that has strong support for subclassing, thanks.

People are doing some cool stuff with javascript - but I think it's in spite of the language, not because of it.

(claimer: I have to deal with JS every day)

JS without a framework is terrible. ExtJS has a great class system.

Re:Another programming language?

[Synerg1y]

See... that's the difference, so you have a bunch of hard coded numbers you don't know off the web, you just copy pasted your code... what now, it's useless. So... play with the numbers, alt + f5 is your best friend, and figure out what they do by changing them, I don't mean to give off the impression to copy paste code w/o understanding, but in the end all blocks of code are are inputs/outputs. I've used business tailored string parser functions off the web that probably took days to write and are illegible if only because of their formatting and the edge cases they take into account. I don't care to understand those, I'm just trying to go home lol, however if I know I have to revisit it, or modify the code, or expand on it, understanding the code becomes the standard (I almost never get this kind of code off the web, it's just too customized, thus the job of a coder). Write enough code and you won't care either, but then again I'm more interested in code theory than business functions so maybe thats the apathy. On that note about 90% of the web revolves around business (porn is a business ;)) and i have yet to see a single canvas deployment, if your an artist your in heaven, otherwise :( also jquery has done canvas for years in an extremely complex form (one of those code examples I don't care to figure out).

I'll still stick to nobody with a decent/good understanding of code would consider jscript as any sort of replacement to any system bigger than a personal html site.

Re:Another programming language?

[Wordplay]

I wouldn't call it terrible--just low-level. Building on top of it (or finding a package that already has) is the right idea. Re: the grandposter, JS lets you subclass; not sure how much stronger support you might be looking for there.

Re:Another programming language?

[Khazunga]

I'll take a language that has strong support for subclassing, thanks.

Given that javascript is a classless object-oriented language, your comment really makes it sound like you haven't yet reached that A-HA moment about javascript.

Prototype-based inheritance is much much more powerful than any kind of subclassing I've seen on any class-based OO language.

Re:Another programming language?

[Chris Mattern]

Is it true that old, worn-out programmers get sent to the glue code factory?

Re:Another programming language?

[whiteboy86]

Corporate languages like .NET, Java, ObjC and now Go are here to create barriers of exit and lockins, /. crowd remembers nothing.

Re:Another programming language?

[kwerle]

Prototype-based inheritance is much much more powerful than any kind of subclassing I've seen on any class-based OO language.

Have you tried ruby? Or even Objective-C?

The only ah-ha moment I've had with JS is more like "uh-huh. So it's going to take a lot more work to do the things I like to do with a language with strong support for subclassing."

Maybe it's just that I like using the word super!

Re:Another programming language?

[jc42]

Corporate languages like .NET, Java, ObjC and now Go are here to create barriers of exit and lockins, ...

So someone understands. ;-)

Actually, that wasn't really true with Java. The gang at Sun did it first as an internal, embedded-controller language, with the ability to download components the first time they were needed, on-the-fly, from a server. The news got out, others got interested, and Sun's response was a serious effort to make it easily available to everyone. This was especially useful after we realized that Java was a good networking tool. Sun kept legal control, because they were well aware of the chaotic results of languages that had incompatible implementations from different vendors, and wanted Java to be compatible everywhere.

But this is all irrelevant now that Sun has been sold to one of the most notorious walled-garden profit-maximizing vendors in the business. So it now belongs with other walled-garden tools like .NET, ObjC, etc., though it wasn't like that for several decades.

This change of status for Java should be a warning to the rest of us. No matter how good you think Google's intentions may be now, a decade from now they may be controlled by (or turned into) a corporation like Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or ....

And when (not if) this happens, what'll you do with the stuff you've built over the years and whose original authors have moved on?

Re:Another programming language?

[frank_adrian314159]

I've tried the grandaddies of all of them - from Simula to Smalltalk to C++ to rolling my own object systems with procedural pointers... hell, I've even used CLOS. Objective C and Ruby aren't that much different (object-model-wise) from Smalltalk.

Prototype-base inheritance is a different animal from class-based. It is more flexible, can handle certain situations that cannot be handled elegantly in class-based inheritance (even with multiple inheritance and/or aspects). If you truly don't understand the advantages then either (a) you hate Javascript (not an uneasy thing to do) and it's colored your whole view of prototypical object systems or (b) you haven't used class-based OO enough to understand their limitations.

Re:Another programming language?

[kiddygrinder]

Dude, there is no way i would want to put my SSN into any page if my browser is compromised with spyware. Sounds like you don't even really understand what javascript is.

Re:Another programming language?

[kiddygrinder]

Actually it's not true of go either, it's open source

Re:Another programming language?

[Anonymous Coward]

.NET and ObjC exist to create lockins. Java and Go were research projects. Oh, and Sun and now Oracle tried for many years to kill Java by attempting to charge for it and making it incompatible. Doom 3 was almost written in Java, except that it didn't interface with opengl properly.

Re:Another programming language?

[Tablizer]

Dude, you stole my Java rant from 15 years ago and search-and-replaced the language name. You will hear from my liars, I mean lawyers. (Hmmm, it's still applicable to Java.)

Re:Another programming language?

[jc42]

Dude, you stole my Java rant from 15 years ago and search-and-replaced the language name.

Yeah, yeah; I'd openly admit that my rant is really about a generic problem in much of the software industry. It's easy to find hype about a Marvelous New Tool (MNT). It's difficult to dig out the actual useful information about it. The same problems appear over and over. It's really a complaint about human nature, not about the specific MNT.

But I do think the Web is especially prone to this sort of problem. It's a confused mess, which sorta "just growed" organically, with little visible design. Except, of course, for the "design" crowd who are very concerned with superficial appearance, and not at all concerned with how usable anything actually might be. Their main effect has been to introduce lots of white space, typically decreasing the information that can be presented to even less than what you could fit on an 80x24 text-only screen. As for design of the behind-the-scene development tools, that's mostly handled by decreeing that it should never be seen by users, and thus need not be discussed (or designed).

Meanwhile, as a developer, I keep trying all sorts of MNTs that are supposed to help me build stuff. I always seem to find that a MNT addresses the trivial problems in the first few hours of coding and testing. But pretty soon, I find I've got a bug to diagnose that the MNT builders never considered, and I've reduced to the traditional conditional debug messages to a a logfile. Then people spend time telling me that I shouldn't need that with this MNT; I ask them how the MNT will solve the current specific problem; they change the subject to more hype about the marvels of the MNT; I finally tune them out and use my obsolete techniques to track down the silly library routine that behaves very slightly differently than what I thought the documentation (such as it is) said it would do.

But that's a universal in all programming languages, too, so you can just search-and-replace the MNT's name with any other, and it'll be equally valid.

OTOH, I do have this character flaw, in that I actually enjoy experimenting with MNTs and finding out whether they're really new (and give me some new insight), or they just have a different syntax than the old tools. And sometimes just an interesting new syntax can be fun. For a while.

Re:Another programming language?

[kwerle]

I've tried the grandaddies of all of them - from Simula to Smalltalk to C++ to rolling my own object systems with procedural pointers... hell, I've even used CLOS. Objective C and Ruby aren't that much different (object-model-wise) from Smalltalk.

Prototype-base inheritance is a different animal from class-based. It is more flexible, can handle certain situations that cannot be handled elegantly in class-based inheritance (even with multiple inheritance and/or aspects). If you truly don't understand the advantages then either (a) you hate Javascript (not an uneasy thing to do) and it's colored your whole view of prototypical object systems or (b) you haven't used class-based OO enough to understand their limitations.

Since I'm coming up on 20 years of OO, maybe I can propose:
(c) I really do like OO Languages and I really don't like prototypers.

It may be that Ada spoiled me for prototype languages very early on. And while Obj-C is a whole lot like smalltalk (though I never did the latter), ruby is a pretty amazingly flexible animal. I sure enjoy the hell out of it. Actually, I understand that recent Obj-C has added some of the feature I enjoy in Ruby.

It's rare to have an intelligent conversation on /. I'm curious

It is more flexible, can handle certain situations that cannot be handled elegantly in class-based inheritance

like what?

kurt@CircleW.org

Re:Another programming language?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prototype-based inheritance, combined with a lack of distinct namespaces and imports, also prevents the kind of static analysis that allows things like "refactor this variable" and "tell me all the places that call this method". It is flexible and powerful indeed, which are properties that are generally orthogonal to large projects managed by multiple people. Not to say that you can't write a large project in Javascript, but static analysis and code help generally makes development less of a pain in the ass.

Re:Another programming language?

[Khazunga]

It is more flexible, can handle certain situations that cannot be handled elegantly in class-based inheritance

like what?

You have to try hard not to see good examples out there in use. The most common case is the prototype version of the Decorator pattern, seen in the uniformization of DOM support across browsers done by jQuery (and similar libraries). Decorator patterns with multiple-class subclassing gets ugly fast, and is trivial with JS.

Re:Another programming language?

[kwerle]

You have to try hard not to see good examples out there in use. The most common case is the prototype version of the Decorator pattern, seen in the uniformization of DOM support across browsers done by jQuery (and similar libraries). Decorator patterns with multiple-class subclassing gets ugly fast, and is trivial with JS.

I'm spoiled by the languages I've used. Ruby has very strong support for decoration at both the object and class level.
http://tenderlovemaking.com/2008/12/04/nokogiris-slop-feature/

I *really* do enjoy ruby. If you have an opportunity to take it for a spin, I think you might enjoy it.

I seriously cut my teeth on Obj-C, but it's been quite a while. I remember it had reasonable decorator possibilities at the class and object level, but it was fragile base class where variables were concerned. Methods you could do anything with. I *think* that's changed in the past 10-15 years.

I never tried Smalltalk, but I thought it would decorate just as easily as javascript.

So I'm still hoping for something with strong subclassing support. I just enjoy 'em more.

EMC?

[Anonymous Coward]

DART huh... Wonder how EMC and their Data Access in Real Time (DART) software will feel about that.

Re:EMC?

[Doc Ruby]

Who cares how their lawyers "feel" about a dictionary word that's marketing a structured programming language, not a software package, that no one in the market will be confused by? Nobody, except maybe some other lawyers looking for more gravy.

Re:EMC?

[obarel]

Probably the same way that Frank McCabe feels about 'Go':
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/soa_webservices/221601351

Re:"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart

[ZeroExistenZ]

BUT ITS EXCITINGLY NEEEWW!!

Cynical geeks are so Millenial.

It may be older than dart, but...

[PSVMOrnot]

It may be older than dart, but I think I'll stick with C. ;-)

Admittedly, most of my programming these days is number crunching rather than web apps.

Re:It may be older than dart, but...

[excelsior_gr]

Then you should consider using Fortran (version >=95). I find it much better than C for this kind of work.

Re:It may be older than dart, but...

[Tablizer]

It may be older than dart [pun], but I think I'll stick with C. ;-)

Finger my pull

It's called javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

last time I checked...

So what does this do different?

[Evangelion]

I'm kind of confused as to where google is going these days.

Is this just a side effect of hiring too many bored CS graduates -- put enough in a room together and they come up with their own languages?

I just can't see this being used outside of google -- Web Programming is largely a solved problem, and there are already a plethora of options. Since MS and Apple won't touch anything that comes out of Google, it'll only ever be relevant on the server side -- which is where there are already too many options.

Unless this does something radical -- and judging by what Go was, I doubt it -- this will probably be a niche thing they use internally.

Re:So what does this do different?

[decipher_saint]

I recall reading that developers at Google are allowed to allocate something like 20% of their time to side projects, regardless of whether or not it's "useful" (because really you can't always predict when some widget, technique or acquired knowledge will come in handy.)

Dart may not be for anyone outside of Google (or inside for that matter), but it's there if and when you need it to do something. *shrug*

Re:So what does this do different?

[Anonymous Coward]

this will probably be a niche thing they use internally, AND only release haphazard updates to the public that have little correlation to what they are using internally.

Re:So what does this do different?

[yk4ever]

Web Programming is largely a solved problem, and there are already a plethora of options.

Business programming was largely a solved problem, you could choose between COBOL and Ada.

Even if the new language isn't used widely, its features might creep into existing ones and improve them (see MS Research, Haskell and C# 3.0+).

Re:So what does this do different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Programming is largely a solved problem

As I am doing web programming for a living I'd strongly disagree. There are some options that suck less than others, but that's all...

Re:So what does this do different?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has had the misfortune of doing web programming for the past 5 years, after a decade of systems programming I can say that Web Programming is very much NOT a solved problem. At least not in the commercial world. The leading Java and .NET web frameworks are horrible to use.

A new language may not be needed, but programming for the web is already enough of its own beast that using a new framework in an existing language is already basically like using a new language.

I, for one, truly hope Dart is a radical improvement on Web Programming. Even if it doesn't succeed, hopefully it'll push the existing frameworks to be better.

Re:So what does this do different?

[19061969]

Ada was for business programming? From what I recall, it was commissioned by the DoD for critical applications like avionics systems - very different to COBOL's market. It's been used in business since but that wasn't it's intended purpose.

Re:So what does this do different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this just a side effect of hiring too many bored CS graduates -- put enough in a room together and they come up with their own languages?

In this case, I kind of doubt it. I know both of the presenters headed to Goto, Lars Bak and Gilad Bracha. I don't know what role they've played in the development of Dart, but they're anything but "recent grad students." They've been doing language design/implementations for quite some time. They both come from roots in the Self language at Sun, and before that some with Smalltalk. After the Sun stint, they did Animorphic, the dynamic JIT engine for Smalltalk. The whole team had been let go from Sun before that when Self was minimized. Ironically, after they did the Animorphic engine, they were bought back so there stuff could become the basis for the HotSpot Java VM. Lars would then do an embedded Smalltalk that run on tiny tiny processors, like the kind you find in speakers, and Gilad has been doing Newspeak for the last couple of years. Oh and Lars was one of the main architects behind the V8 JavaScript engine. The trends are simplistic/minimalistic languages, dynamic in nature, optimized to run fast. If they're both associated with Dart, you can bet Dart follows along those lines, at least in spirit.

Re:So what does this do different?

[loufoque]

Web Programming is largely a solved problem

Was it ever a problem?
It's just something you need to throw coding monkeys at.

Re:So what does this do different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Programming is a mess, and has been since it's inception. Maybe building simple page-based sites is pretty much solved through the evolution of the plethora of server side frameworks (debatable considering persistent CSS browser quirks and the problems with targeting the mobile market). Building web Applications on the other hand, is far from solved.

Pre-Dart I think the closest 'solution' to the web app problem was the Cappuccino Web Framework (http://cappuccino.org/), though that seems to have lost steam since its developers were bought out by Motorolla and then (curiously enough) Google recently.

Ultimately what we need is a language with a strong focus on security, modularity, performance, and syntax minimalism / consistency that hopefully has good tooling support. Equally important is the presence of client side frameworks built on top of the language that focus on providing reusable and extensible GUI components, an application framework (i.e. MVC), local persistence, and server side connectivity.

The trouble is all these problems currently require dealing with a hodge podge of HTML DOM manipulation, CSS, and Javascript ajax and as long as these are being directly targeted by the developer, there will always be compatibility issues. It's up to the framework to handle these cross browser incompatibilities and that's why HTML and CSS must be abstracted away from the developers. The language should allow programmatic View customization as well as loading content and styles from some serialized format akin to IOS xib files, to allow decent GUI building support tools to be created. The framework can then worry about generating syntactically correct, and cross browser safe HTML + CSS.

It could be a bit early to call it, but based on this leaked memo: http://markmail.org/message/uro3jtoitlmq6x7t, it seems these are the exact problems Dart seems to be addressing. Here's hoping the language syntax is closer to Smalltalk than C. The persistence of the Algol syntax in every major mainstream programming language is really completely unjustified, and a perfect example of the 'worse is better' mentality that continues to keep software engineering from really becoming computer science.

Re:So what does this do different?

[SomeStupidNickName12]

Huh? I came from a heavy PHP background and over the last 5 years moved across in the java world. Stuff like JBoss Seam and Richfaces is awesome - remembering the days of PHP is like remembering an abusive marriage

Simplicity is key

[trcollinson]

The problem with adding yet another language to the mix is engineers as a whole need to focus on simplicity and good standards and stay away from reinventing the wheel. Diluting the market with more languages to "make web development easier" or "help with web development performance" or even "fill the gaps of other languages" is ludicrous. The problem is most anything can be done very simply and effectively with the existing tools that are available, but really developers are always looking for the next language that's "easier to learn" or "fills my gap of boredom in my current language". We'd be far better off focusing on truly understanding and deep diving into the languages we have. If there are gaps or short comes (which inevitably there will be!) then we should work to fix those in the language, not reinvent the wheel again.

Re:Simplicity is key

[frank_adrian314159]

I agree with one statement you make: "engineers as a whole need to focus on simplicity and good standards and stay away from reinventing the wheel". However, if the wheel you currently have is square, it's not much of a "good standard". The web, as it stands now, is incredibly broken. It is a mishmash of accreted crap and one needs to know a multiplicity of technologies, each craptacular in their own unique, broken way, to make a simple, interactive web page work. All-in-all, it needs a lot of work. Since your premises are incorrect (i.e., the web is "simple" and has "good standards"), so are your conclusions.

In fact, if one could come up with a single language with coherent syntax and semantics which delineated particular aspects of web development (logic, interactions, presentation) without learning five different languages, it could be "simple". As such, as long as people are progressing towards that goal, they are doing a good thing. If they made it using a lisp-like syntax, they would be doing God's work.

Re:Simplicity is key

[trcollinson]

I guess that last part there is the real question, and my problem with this news as a whole. Is Google making a single language with coherent syntax and semantics? I know I shouldn't prejudge, having not seen the language. But given past experience I would say it is unlikely that Dart is moving towards the goals you mention.

I also agree with your statement "If they made it using a lisp-like syntax, they would be doing God's work." Not that I am any huge fan of lisp, though I am, but the point is, if you are Google, why not throw your weight behind an existing solution making it better, fixing it's short comings, and not producing the "next new thing"? Unfortunately the truth might be that for marketing purposes it is more interesting to create a whole new language, get buzz behind it, send people off to conferences to talk about it, and ignore the existing communities. Existing solutions have issues, but I wouldn't say all of them are broken to the point where they cannot be fixed effectively, which is the only time a completely new language would make sense.

vs ASP.NET JSP?

[Synerg1y]

I have no idea why I would want to switch, this article is kinda meh. Go speculate some more.

For those in universities, picture how long it would take to adopt such a language.

For those with inhouse systems, wanna recode your app for google? :)

Any DART jobs listed yet?

[SpacePunk]

10+ years experience needed, of course.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

After being in the programming field for a while now it seems that often companies that post those kind of job listings are looking for a reason to hire H1-B people. They can now legitimately go and say the couldn't find an American worker with that experience since obviously the job requires it and then hire some cheap labor. The other case is that it is a HR issue since they are told to find a senior programmer with experience with technology X. Technology x may only have been around for 2 or 3 years, but the HR drone immediately thinks they need someone with 10+ years of experience with technology x and then filter you out because you don't have that experience. I had that problem when I graduated college and companies were looking for people with 10 years of java experience even though the language had only been around for 5 years or so at that time

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember interviewing for a job in '06 where "10+" years of experience in C#/.NET were required. I had been working with both since the public betas(we had a client who was, shall we say, 'excited' about the new platform), and was told I was out of consideration because I didn't have enough experience. Since I had other prospects and they'd self-selected out by that point anyway, I told them flatly that anyone who could meet that requirement was a liar, even if they worked for Microsoft. They laughed.

I often wonder if they're still laughing.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[sacridias]

Solution: 10 Years experience with Java and other Object oriented languages.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, shoot HR people.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

But how do you expect a HR drone to be able to know what an OO language is. I have never been impressed with HR people as I have talked with some on the phone who had no idea what the company actually did. They knew they did something with computers but beyond that nothing.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Thugthrasher]

That's where I'm lucky at my job. I work with the HR people a lot (it's a large company, so there is a large HR section, one that actually has uses for a variety of applications that I help develop and maintain). So when they are looking at hiring an IT position and something like that comes up (they say they need experience with one thing, but experience with other, similar things could count, especially when they say things like "Linux Servers" and someone puts a specific version on their resume), they come and ask me: "Does this count? Is this the same thing?" and I help teach them. Our recruiters are learning more and more about this kind of thing.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

LMAO!

Sr. Dart Programmer WANTED!

o Must have 10 years programming with Dart
o Must have 3 years programming with Java
o Must have 7 years experience with IBM Websphere
o Must have 3 years experience with Oracle(BEA) Weblogic
o Further requirements Perl, Python, Linux, AIX, Solaris, EMC, MS Exchange, Active Directory.
o Any experience with Cisco and Juniper A PLUS!!

Compensation 38-52k dependant on experience.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[omnichad]

Wow - that looks like every job I saw during my last job search. Since I couldn't figure out what was actually part of the job, I just gave up applying.

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Tablizer]

So visa programmers lie for 1/3 the cost of a domestic? Or does their superior education allow them to lie 3x more efficiently?

Re:Any DART jobs listed yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why people always call H-1B "cheap". Employers are required by law to pay "prevailing wage" to H-1B hires, which in many cases is above what one would pay to a local entry level hire... In addition, there is a relatively large fee and pain the ass paperwork to fill out to hire an H-1B that makes them even more expensive.

DoubleClick DART

[Anonymous Coward]

its got something to do with DoubleClick which Google Acquired.

Re:"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart

[maxwell demon]

Pretty much. What's there to say? Until there are details, all we know is that Google has a language called Dart.

Well, it comes with a whole new model of software development. Basically, you throw darts on a dartboard with keywords and punctuation printed on it.

Re:"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart

[MightyMartian]

So it's a PHP derivative then.

Re:Grr pun prediction

[glwtta]

Hmm, judging from your uid, I'd estimate you're at least 24 years old, probably older. Which is depressing.

Functional Version

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, a couple programmers from the Dart team have begun work on a functional version of Dart, called "Fart".

Re:Functional Version

[maxwell demon]

In related news, a couple programmers from the Dart team have begun work on a functional version of Dart, called "Fart".

That's nothing compared to the logic programming version of it: Lart.

Re:Functional Version

[larry bagina]

I don't much care for the interactive dart shell - shart. Make one accident and your coworkers will never let you live it down :(

Re:Grr pun prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Gay? Really, a$$hole?

a$$hole? Really? That was pretty gay.

lets jump on a Google Wave and discuss it!

[citizenr]

oh wait ...

Re:lets jump on a Google Wave and discuss it!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd better post it on your Google Plus Circle Wall quickly, before that disappears too.

Re:lets jump on a Google Wave and discuss it!

[melted]

Wave is still there. Just sayin'.

Programming Languages

[wbtittle]

Learning a new language doesn't take huge amounts of time. Watching the next wave of 'tools' come washing over the side that will make me more productive because it "just does it", makes me laugh. If all anyone does is what the next tool was designed to do, it just does it, but for some reason no one ever wants to stick just with what it does and suddenly I am figuring out how to twist the new tool to do what the inspired people want.

I suspect the real lesson I need to learn well is "Use programming to make your life easier, don't attempt to make a living programming".

Every time I hear a manager say "That's not hard to do is it?", you should be able to do that in a couple of minutes, I cringe.

Re:Programming Languages

[93 Escort Wagon]

Every time I hear a manager say "That's not hard to do is it?", you should be able to do that in a couple of minutes, I cringe.

I believe we have the same boss.

Re:Programming Languages

[kiddygrinder]

Hah, my old boss' favorite was "I thought you fixed that already"

Re:Programming Languages

[93 Escort Wagon]

My boss' favorite line to the rest of us IT staff - whenever yet another faculty member comes in with a new Mac laptop and asks about support - is "so how many faculty have Macs now? One, two?"

We have about a dozen faculty with Mac laptops now. And no, my boss is not joking.

language police

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this language is implemented in one of the four permitted languages at Google: C/C++, Java, Javascript, or Python.

Re:language police

[istartedi]

Is Google really lumping C and C++ as "C/C++"? That was an easy way to troll comp.lang.c last time I checked.

Re:language police

[PCM2]

If you allow the use of a C++ compiler, you can write code in pure C or C++. Hence, C/C++. But then, it's never been particularly hard to troll a Usenet group.

Re:language police

[istartedi]

C is not a strict subset of C++. There are just enough subtleties to be annoying; perhaps even dangerous.

Please note though, I'm not placing myself in the "C/C++" pedant camp. I just see it as shorthand for "C or C++" and it never really bothered me.

Why so negative?

[Anonymous Coward]

People sure are negative about something that we have no details about. It's not like Javascript is so great that one can't imagine something a lot better taking over. It's right to be skeptical, and certainly there are entrenched interests to deal with. But if it's open source, then at least Mozilla and perhaps Apple would listen. I'm sure it would take longer to convince Microsoft.

But despite the improvements that HTML5 have brought, web apps are still clunky and a little unnatural to both use and develop compared to desktop apps, so we should appreciate attempts to improve things, or at least not dismiss them out of hand.

DART = EMC's OS

[Bardwick]

Data Access in real Time. It's what run the NAS heads..

Why so negative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only negative comments so far and absolutely nothing is known about this... This will probably go nowhere like most new languages but don't tell me e.g. JavaScript is perfect?

Re:Grr pun prediction

[Tr3vin]

He is actually only 14. Poor kid was raised by slashdot.

only 10 years away.

[jweller13]

No worries. Fusion power is only 10 years away....as we've been hearing for the last 30 years.

Re:only 10 years away.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dart certainly has some interesting features.

And then

[ThatsNotPudding]

abondon it six months later.

I was hoping Javafx would fill this role

[peter303]

But it has fallen through cracks after the takeover.

I'll give it a chance

[gsgriffin]

With the frustration of working with so many different languages and some that only work when you load in a bunch of code (jQuery...awesome, but JS should do all this natively) or a framework, I'm very curious to see if Google is in fact focusing on web development and can provide a platform that allows for simplified coding without lots of browser overhead. Why do we think that languages should stop and never evolve or change or die? I for one don't want to still be coding 20 years from now with JS and PHP the way they are. Would love to have something that works hand in hand between server, db, and browser in a more seamless way. I'll wait to see before passing judgment.

Re:I'll give it a chance

[UtterCoward]

What? Someone on slashdot is giving a chance to something brand new rather than just caustically dismissing it? I knew that all these years of lurking would pay off someday! Bravo to you, sir!

Re:I'll give it a chance

[stixn]

>Would love to have something that works hand in hand between server, db, and browser in a more seamless way

I just discovered Grails two months ago and I think it does all of the above. It's built on top of spring mvc and you can use all existing java libraries/code in your code. The learning curve for learning Groovy syntax is graceful (if you know java) and follows the 'principle of least astonishment.' A couple examples...

Persisting an object to a database:
def foo = new Foo().save()

Getting an object from a database:
def foo = Foo.get(id)

And the best part: no xml config files. yay!

Re:I'll give it a chance

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, C is still useful. And Lisp. And God help us, even Fortran.

Re:I'll give it a chance

[gsgriffin]

I'll take a look at that, but the problem as I see it with all of the languages is cornering your code into a limited knowledge base. It often takes a company like Google to push something out mainstream that gets lots of people to know it well and provides a good base for adding engineers to your team. My fear in going down a narrow road is that it will be hard (or expensive) to find someone to help.

Re:I'll give it a chance

[gooneybird]

Note: "simplified coding" != solving complex problems simply

"There is no silver bullet that results in good code. Good code is the result of being written by a good programmer - regardless of the language used"

Re:I'll give it a chance

[SomeStupidNickName12]

Hibernate has provided this type of functionality to Java for ages and with a decent framework you should have at most a couple of XML for your entire solution. With a decent framework everything is annotated - added an @Entity to your class and you done.

EntityManager em;

Persisting an object to a database:

Location loc = new Location();
em.persist(loc);

Getting an object from:
Location loc = em.find(Location.class, id);

Re:"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart

[Anonymous Coward]

I LOLled.

PARROT!!!!

[rubypossum]

Why the heck aren't they at least using Parrot? It's not hard to target and it would really help the project to get some extra programmers on board. In theory Parrot would allow code sharing between all the different languages that target it. So Dart could call Ruby which can call Python, etc. It's the great unifier of the programming religious wars, and nobody seems to talk about it anymore. Even when it's finally DONE! If you're going to make a new dynamic language, please, please make it using Parrot.

Re:PARROT!!!!

[u17]

Is there even one mature language that runs on Parrot? (not brainfuck, etc.) They seem to be in perpetual-development mode.

Re:PARROT!!!!

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Is there even one mature language that runs on Parrot? (not brainfuck, etc.)

No. :D

Short Circuit Evaluation

[Dareth]

All HR sees, or keyword filters is: 10 Years experience with Java

Re:Short Circuit Evaluation

[sacridias]

Exactly. The fact they have no idea what I am saying is what gets me past them and into the interview with someone that knows what I mean. I used this trick on several "new" platforms/languages over the years. Basically it sets you apart from those not witty enough to put something like that on their resume, so when HR submits a stack of only 2 or 3 developers that met the requirements, you are among them.
After that point it is usually about talking to someone that knows the difference, and understands what OOP is and how it relates to Java. At that point you can flatter them with the years of C++, C, C64 Basic that you have.

Re:"There aren't yet any technical details on Dart

[drb226]

That sent a cold chill up my spine.

Re:Grr pun prediction

[rwa2]

Huh? what? Uh, I have nothing against gay people, I have a chuckle myself every once in a while.

I am a bit peeved about all the fabulous names used by java "apps" and "applets" and "beans" and "singlets" and "servlets" and stuff. It just makes me want to EXECUTE them all with EXTREME PREJUDICE.

But I really try not to refer to master/slave components anymore, that's just offensive. Hardware should not be bound thusly.

Java/Oracle fiasco ?

[boorack]

I wonder if creating new language (and presumably VM) is Google response to Oracle efforts to turn Java into a big steaming pile of crap. I like dynamic languages like Python or Java Script but strong types enforcement (or better: strong enforcement for overall programming contracts also known as APIs) and compiler ability to catch as many errors as possible are key issues when choosing language for bigger applications.

Who knows maybe it will be good or maybe not

[TheCount22]

Hopefully this new language addresses concurrency with lightweight processes, immutable message passing and location transparency, security with capabilities and has a preemptive scheduler like Erlang. Also it would be nice to have a nice type system with a FP/OO hybrid language with no shared mutable state. Built-in fault tolerance and replication would be nice too.

But who am I kidding there is a 1% chance of that happening.

Both web and the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's like bein' both country and western.

A new browser

[Tablizer]

Google, wanna do something bold and needed? Blow up the HTML/CSS/JS browser. Create a new "GUI Browser" that makes creating desktop-like apps much easier. Biz owners keep wanting desktop-like behavior. Base the GUI language on mostly XML. One has to be a certified rocket scientist to get even simple GUI activity to work right on different platforms with the current "standards". Even big-name big-money sites F it up often.

Re:A new browser

[spectro]

good idea but no XML please /o\

Opa

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought all of this was being solved by the Opa language/platform/whatever. Regardless, it looks interesting:
http://opalang.org/

Have Another Go

[Anonymous Coward]

The more the merrier.

Excuses.

[warrax_666]

The first is subjective... there are plenty of good things about dynamic weak typing.

Note that "dynamic" (as opposed to "static") and "weak" (as opposed to "strong") are orthogonal in this context. Dynamic type checking can be a good thing. Weak typing... not so much.

I haven't been bit by scoping rules too many times, I think that's mostly because I don't write JS like it's C or Java.

The point is that the current JS scoping rules have no easily discernible advantage over normal lexical block scopes. It's a "feature" which leads to hard-to-find bugs for no advantage.

Sure, we have JSLint and/or strict mode, but that's not really a full solution.

(I realize JS is its own languge, but the mere fact that the syntax is so close to C/Java should be taken into account when departing from "normal" semantics in C-like langauges. Especially if it doesn't actually have any noticable advantages.)

The === vs == operator thing is dumb, but hardly as dumb as PHP's situation, and honestly in all the lines of JS I've written, I've never had to use ===.

Read "JavaScript: The Good Parts" (or just watch this) for why you should NEVER EVER use "==" in any capacity.

Philip Wadler (Haskell) has already solved this

[Anonymous Coward]

http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/

I will be using this instead, personally.