A record of doing a new thing every day in 2011
Tech post alert: Yesterday I played about with Dart, a new “language for structured web programming” from Google.
First thoughts are really around the question of what is the problem this language is trying to solve?
I can defnitely see why you might want to implement an object-orientated wrapper over the general horror that is JavaScript to make it more manageable. However I’d be very interested in the performance overhead of running this wrapper code client side, and their other goal of running on the server seems unlikely to ever interest me.
If I don’t worry about the why, the language itself looks quite nicely designed with lots of low-level building blocks that are generally missing in regular JavaScript. For a non-JS expert this could definitely be useful if I did want to ever program anything client-side more than a few basic event handlers or some Facebook integration :-)
I haven’t got any ideas on how I might use this for real yet, and the lack of current support for IE9 means it’s not production ready as yet, but definitely something to keep an eye on.
