Dart

Posted on October 10, 2011
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There’s a new scripting language caked Dart out that everyone’s talking about. It seems to be something halfway between Python and C++. I’m not completely sure of the point. Its main selling point seems being able to do both static typing or dynamic types. It appears to be targeting the Javascript market rather than the general (server side) scripting market. It’s interesting although I’m not sure it offers enough to compete at this stage.

But then I do only very simple client side web scripting. Perhaps if I had code with hundreds of lines of JavaScript or worse was writing libraries this would seem like a god-send. We’ll see if it picks up any steam.

New languages are always interesting to me. Far too many are just focused on one cool feature and not enough are focused on practical use by programmers solving real problems. For them implementation is at least as important as the language itself. It’s amazing how far Apple and Google have pushed their JavaScript interpreters.

Google Go is an other interesting recent language although honestly I’m not sure how much in use it is. I believe Google uses it but I don’t know how much others do. One that I’ve actually been curious about learning is Clojure – a Lisp variant – although I’ve just not had enough time yet.

It’s interesting to me that most new languages end up being variants on older languages – primarily C/C++, SmallTalk, and Lisp (or combinations of the two such C + Smalltalk as Obj-C). Then there are the languages you just don’t hear much about now such as Forth. Fortran’s still around, heavily expanded from the Fortran I learned in my youth. One that I’ve never seen much is APL although it did influence mathematical languages like Mathematica or MatLab.

Still the last real significant language introductions that I know are Ruby and Python. (PHP counts but was already popular in the late 90′s whereas I remember Python really getting popular only after Python 2 was released – others might disagree)

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