Dart is Dead

I&#x27;m still using it. It&#x27;s a nice language.<p>Just because something isn&#x27;t super trendy, doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not a useful tool.

So I started reading this small article (as a piece of opinion, not sure what to call it), and suddenly Touhou. Not something I expect in a rant about a programming language.<p>But back on topic: I believe Dart was doomed to die as a JS replacement for the sole reason it was not the joint work of all mayor browser vendors, but an attempt of dominance of a single one.

I have written apps in Dart, CoffeeScript, and JavaScript. CoffeeScript is a definite improvement on JavaScript, but I find it still lacks a lot compared to Dart. I still hope Dart takes off, and any new language needs at least 10 years to gain any amount of significant support.<p>I also find that JavaScript developers <i>love</i> their spaghetti code. Bad code proliferates in the JavaScript world. Many may disagree with me, but the empirical evidence does not. Just look at the codebase for any major product, like jQuery for example. I have encountered JavaScript developers with years of experience encourage practice that in any other language would be considered a &quot;hack.&quot;<p>Edit: By this, I mean some JavaScript developers will not like Dart because it&#x27;s too different and restrictive compared with JavaScript.

When Dart was released, I was curious to see if they&#x27;d position it as an alternative to Java on Android.<p>They hired kevmoo (a pretty well-respected Seattle area engineer and game dev) as a PM, which again led me to believe they were perhaps looking at game dev on Dart on Android. I fully expected them to start shipping Android with the Dart VM, open up a new set of Android packages for taking advantage of existing&#x2F;native stuff, and boom: suddenly the Android ecosystem benefits from a new set of developers coming at it from the web angle. That&#x27;s what Ludei and others have been trying to promote. This goes deeper into solving perf issues, however.<p>Now that Chrome tabs are represented as individual windows in Android 5.0, the line between &quot;app&quot; and &quot;web app&quot; on mobile is ever more blurry.

The only use of Dart I&#x27;ve seen in the wild is Notch&#x27;s Ludum Dare work... Although it&#x27;s a good language, it&#x27;s not great and doesn&#x27;t offer much more than what&#x27;s in the wild. So, Google should use the good pieces and merge them in other projects.

Personally I believe that once Dart development is finished, Google will roll the good parts of the server-side pieces to Go and frontend into ATScript&#x2F;Angular 2.0.