For anyone wondering, Lars Bak isn't known only for Dart. He also led the team that built the V8 JavaScript engine that powers Chrome, Node.js, MongoDB, etc.
What a wonderful and informative discussion! and I am very impressed how civil the discussion remained. Lots of opposing views which were intelligently debated.
anders hejlsberg was originally a Pascal Gods which is a direct descendant of ALGOL. meanwhile Lars Bak was a big C++ guy which is influence by C which was derive from BCPL and CPL a largely modified flavor of algol.. we are actually watching a collision of 2 big brain people that comes from a different types of languages.. awesome to listen to their big ideas and opinions..
Typescript is a GENIUS IDEA, you take a giant project in javascript and magically make it type safe, extensible, you can get compile time warnings and errors. Dart is a just a new language on a playground that can't accommodate a new language.
That actually doesn't sound any better than suggesting to create a modern language by extending COBOL. Sometimes you have to start from scratch. Setting things into stone was one of the worst mistakes of Smalltalk-80, despite the spectacular success it had.
>Sometimes you have to start from scratch And sometimes you haven't. JavaScript is not bad. JavaScript is a good language for small applications but lack of strict static typing makes it hard to use for large projects. So TypeScript is an almost perfect solution here. TypeScript is related to JavaScript in a similar way like C++ is related to C.
Anders Hejlsberg rocks :) .. making TS a superset of JS is genius idea Dart -> similar problem as SASS TS -> solved similar to SCSS Btw I think that Dart is really nice language .. that almost no one uses. On one side, it's amazing that we have those langs, but reality shows again and again that despite their superior safety, syntax etc. we are stuck with langs everybody uses daily.
All the potatoes goes to Anders Hejlsberg ,who had the worst idea of the two, but with a better implementation, and working for a serious company, not a bunch of startatups glued together, wich is Google.
Typescript == JS++ ==> compiles to JS Dart == original (from Java, C#, etc) more appropriate for bigger web apps, taking in account the mind, health, maintainability, safe, produtivity of them. ==> compiles to JS
They both have equally valid technologies, simply born of different ideologies. But Anders is so cordial and polite compared to Lars' hostile and sardonic that I'm more inclined to opt for typescript!
Plus all the advantages of Dart will only come to fruition if there is a Dart VM in every browser, which will most probably never happen. It isn't even in Chrome.
Altough I continue to think Lars is right in his position, his wrong in the company he choose to work.GOogle is killing Dart by starvation, while Microsoft put dozens of guys in very single project they have,even the most stupid ones.
