Gilad Bracha / Lars Bak / Google - Dart: Progress the Web
Three weeks ago or so, I came back from a Toronto Smalltalk Users Group meeting, to a nice surprise: a bit of a late night (here in TO) flurry of articles about Dart - or Dash(?) - "a new programming language from Google". I think Dart will be more than a "language" - rather a vm/environment that will run inside the browser (and also outside surely).
This is extremely exciting news, for a few reasons:
First, the people and the architecture: Gilad Bracha (Strongtalk, Java, Newspeak) and Lars Bak (Also Strongtalk, Javascript V8). I am sure they will do a great work; if this goes the right way and Dart becomes accepted, it may be a huge step towards secure, performing web architecture and applications, and finally, after 20 years, may progress "the web" beyond it's primitive stage (web, unlike "the internet" is a crappy construct developed from a simple sharing system of scientific articles, still bears all the architectural chains and shortsightedness of it's beginning).
Second reason for excitement, Smalltalk. Just to be brief here: 30-40 years later, depending where you start counting, Smalltalk is still more elegant, clean, and beautiful than all mainstream (or non mainstream) languages. Just one thing, would you rather createRectangle(10,20, 30, 40) (what is 10, 20, 30, 40 .. even with better naming the order is unclear), or createRectangleAtX: 10 y:20 width: 30 height: 40? I am guessing Dart syntax will borrow from Smalltalk, but that is just technicality, although a welcome one.
Third reason for excitement, security and performance above what Javascript can offer.
Some relevant links:
The leaked motivation (which is a great read by Mark Miller): http://pastebin.com/NUMTTrKj
Probably the best balanced read on the Dart subject I could find: http://css.dzone.com/news/google-dart-“ultimately
A few more Dart speculation links:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/95417-google-announces-dart-programming-language
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392791,00.asp#fbid=rl8OouL9eVJ
October 10, 2011, I will be looking forward to read news from Arhus!
PS: I am no fan of one company taking over my world (had my shares of passive/active resistence to Microsoft ...and happy to say gradually proven right), but the combination of open sourced, and developed in the open, of Nacl and Dart may be the sanity rescue of the web. The alternative is the "as we went", shortest path, ugliest solution web we watched "develop" the last 20 years. We will see in 5-15 years!
