[throwawaydbfif]

I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google.

Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch. You're free to look at how great it is, feel it's well refined curves and admire the finish, but God help you if you don't like how the project is going and want to fork it for yourself.

Don't bother trying to commit a new feature to any of Google's software that they don't agree with. It will languish forever. Don't bother forking either, because they'll build a small proprietary bit into it that grows like a tumor until it's impossible to run the "open source" code without it.

Fuck dart, I don't care how great it is. Microsoft is being the good one in this case by extending js with typescript, google is trying to upend it into something that they control

[kyrra]

Eh? Dart was trying to replace JavaScript in some fashion, but that obviously failed (they had good intentions, but bad execution). Seeing that Chrome hasn't included it yet, I doubt it will. So that dream is dead.

Dart is a replacement for GWT at this point. See AdWords being written in dart now[0]. Though it's not clear now Flutter.io will play into all this (that's targeting mobile with no web target).

As for typescript, Google actually embraced that fairly heavily with Angular2 being written in it.

[0] http://news.dartlang.org/2016/03/the-new-adwords-ui-uses-dar...

[afsina]

AFAIK, Angular Dart is used heavily within Google.

https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular

[cwp]

Give me a break. It's just as accurate to say "Dart is an open standard, Javascript is owned by Mozilla". There may be valid technical, pragmatic or moral reasons to prefer Javascript, but this is just FUD.

(See http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...)

[throwawaydbfif]

Really? Google's once rosy history with open source project isn't looking too friendly these days.

And yeah ECMA is a totally open standard with committee members from all sorts of companies and backgrounds. Dart is not. I don't care if JS is slightly worse, as least I know that for now and the foreseeable future I won't be paying a google tax to use it.

After the open source community "stole" mapreduce and hbase google has begun offering maglev and spanner as "services" rather than giving them to the OSS community. Maglev was supposed to be open sourced a while ago, and google now offers DDoS protection service on Google cloud instead, most famously with their Krebs PR stunt. Maybe they forgot about it? Did I mention they removed "don't be evil" as their motto a while back because it was "immature"?

Google has begun down a decidedly different path since the Alphabet transition a while back. It's no longer the brainchild of Sergey and Larry, it's losing its soul and becoming a shareholder cash machine. Maybe the floundering of some of their moonshot projects is taking a toll on the companies' confidence to remain a market leader while maintaining their traditional values of openness and shunning of questionable marketing tactics? I'll admit that's pure speculation but I really wish I knew what happened to the Google I remember.

Since I'm being accused of FUD I might as well throw a bunch more speculation in for the hell of it. Their most recent papers are conspicuously lacking enough detail to make your own implementation, and read more like marketing whitepapers on how to use their services and how great they are. Their tensorflow library was probably released as truly open only because they couldn't hire enough devs with machine learning experience to meet their needs. They needed to introduce the world to enough of the secret sauce to meet their own demand and they remain completely silent on how their real moneymakers work.

My extreme speculation? They started using machine learning for search a few years back and found out just how easily their previous search algorithms, developed and perfected for years, were utterly outclassed within months. A start-up with these techniques could have been their undoing. This oversight cannot be repeated, they cannot offer too much of their technology back to the world anymore lest they risk being beaten to death by their own weapons. Thus google threw away a lot of what made them google, and rebuilt themselves as a semi monopolistic oligarch that's much more in line with traditional too big to fail companies.

They now spend more on political lobbyists than any tech company by far. They like to release nice things for free when a competitor just happens to be a making a decent living charging for the same thing. They engage in a lot of the typical corporate warfare now that doesn't seem natural for a company with a nice playful exterior and an original motto of "don't be evil".

As far as the FUD accusation, does it count that I don't work for or with any company that has anything to do with google or the other tech giants? These are just my opinions based on observations, and a lot of those opinions are backed by verifiable facts.

You're free to put the same data together and make your own conclusions, which would lead to more interesting discussion than dismissing my points just because.

[Synaesthesia]

One addition I would like to make, every corporation is a shareholder cash machine, and Google has always been one, it didn't suddenly become one. The problem is in the institution of corporations itself, which has a lot of flaws.

[kllrnohj]

> Did I mention they removed "don't be evil" as their motto a while back because it was "immature"?

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

"Don't be evil" is the first and last thing stated.

Why do you post stuff that's trivially searchable and trivially called out as bullshit? Why would I bother reading any of your rant if you can't get trivial details right?

[munificent]

> And yeah ECMA is a totally open standard with committee members from all sorts of companies and backgrounds. Dart is not.

Dart is an ECMA standard: https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec...

[wstrange]

Spanner is as much about Google's data center, hardware and network architecture as it is about the code.

It is not clear how they would "contribute" that to OSS

[innocentoldguy]

JavaScript sucks because it has a weak standard library, ugly syntax, and its monopoly in web development has the industry stuck in a state of mediocrity, in my opinion. I have a VERY hard time believing that the apex of engineering intelligence and ingenuity is found in JavaScript. Also, as much as I love Elm, for instance, languages that transpile to JavaScript are just lipstick on a pig, and do little to solve the underlying problem. I'm not a fan of Dart either, but at least Google made an attempt to solve the JavaScript issue in the best way possible with Dart; by aiming to get rid of it.

[throwawaydbfif]

I agree with you that JavaScript sucks balls in far more ways than is reasonable for such a widely used language. The design is seriously shit when compared directly to really any popular language, even PHP.

I disagree with transpilers not being a reasonable answer. Eventually JavaScript will be okay to work with, some day. Until then, transpilers offer nearly unlimited freedom in redesigning the bad parts of the language while maintaining 100% fowards and backwards compatibility. It's really as good as it can get.

Since they compile down to a Turing complete language there's really no limit to the heaps of dog shit they can abstract away. Historically, c++ is nothing more than an insanely complicated C preprocessor and it has more than proven that such a strategy can be viable long term. In fact, the first c++ compiler made, cfront, is still available and literally outputs raw C code from c++.

Typescript is easily my favorite since it's designed to compile down to very human friendly JS. Getting typescript out of your stack requires nothing more than one last compilation with optimizations turned off. Unlike most transpilers (looking at you babel) the output JavaScript uses standard JS workarounds like the crockerford privacy pattern for classes. This gives typescript fairly practical fowards and backwards compatibility. You can always target output to a newer version of js or convert your codebase out of typescript back to js at any time.

If it catches enough traction, browsers will begin implementing native typescript parsing since it offers many potential performance optimizations on top of what js is capable of. At this point you just maintain your typescript codebase and use some library to give your legacy clients some transpiled J S on the fly.

If typescript gets enough adoption it will fix JavaScript for good, in the same way the original c++ compiler (which just transformed to c) led to native support, so I'm really rooting for it.

[munificent]

> since it offers many potential performance optimizations on top of what js is capable of.

It doesn't, unfortunately. TypeScript's type system is unsound, so the VM can rely on types for optimization.

[innocentoldguy]

I can see your point about transpilers. Of all the transpilers I've used, I like Elm the best, due to its functional nature, syntax, strong typing, compiler, and debugger. It isn't fully stable yet, as a language, and there have been breaking changes in each release since I started using it, but it offers the most promising departure from JavaScript. I guess anything that facilitates the de-turding of web development in general is a good thing.

[throwawaydbfif]

Haha de-turding is a great way to put it. I just don't think a new language is a reasonable option. There's what maybe... 50,000 different versions of the ~500 web browsers from different eras still running out there somewhere?

If having code work almost everywhere is important for a project, that project will be using vanilla ES3-5 JavaScript for the next 10+ years. Maybe not the latest startups but all sorts of enterprisey ancient stuff that needs to run needs some path forward. If typescript can provide that it will become the lowest common denominator at any company that ships both new and legacy codebases.

Typescript to JS transpilation is extremely similar to the strategy that produced C++ from C. We know it will work, and it's been done before to great success. C++ isn't perfect but I think everyone agrees it's definitely a lot nicer to work with than C, and that's exactly how I describe Typescript as well

[innocentoldguy]

I do see your point about C++. I was programming when it first came out, back in 1985. However, I've always thought C++ felt "Band-aid-y." It never felt elegant and cohesive to me, the way Objective C does. C++ is like a chainsaw-hang-glider-shotgun-bat; badass, to say the least, but still a clumpy work of bailing wire and duct tape. Typescript feels the same way, only not quite so badass. It's more like the Robin to C++'s Batman.

Having said that, my only exposure to Typescript has been in Angular 2. Having used other tools like Ember, React, and Elm, Angular 2 seems like a magic step backwards to me. I will concede that my opinions on Typescript may be tinted by my experience with Angular 2 though, so I'll give Typescript a stand-alone, honest evaluation, and adjust my opinions as necessary.

[isoos]

Looks like alternative facts have reached the tech world too?

You can take as hard look at Google as you would like, but choosing Microsoft over Google (one for-profit company over another), while not caring how the technology, the licensing or the workflow compares is a bit hypocrite. (e.g.they are both open, and they both have rules of commits).

I'm wondering, why do you need a throwaway for such heavily invested FUD? Your other comments here are in similar tone, and I'm surprised to see such hatred without any obvious trigger. Maybe if you would come forward with your story, it would be easier to discuss it?

disclaimer: ex-Googler, worked with Dart for 4+ years, I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.

[logicchains]

>I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.

In what ways do you consider it ahead of Typescript? Personally as someone who's particularly fond of static type systems (Haskell and the like), Typescript's type system seems way more advanced and powerful than Dart's (union and intersection types, in particular, and non-nullable types). Map types (introduced in Typescript 2.1) also seem pretty interesting.

[isoos]

Some of my earlier notes are in this thread (it is more about the day-to-day feature I actually use and like, and less about the fine details of the type system) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13371009

Personally I don't get the hype around union types: at the point where you need to check which type you are working with, you may as well use a generic object (and maybe an assert if you are pedantic).

Intersection types may be a nice subtlety in an API, but I haven't encountered any need for it yet. Definitely not a game-changer.

I longed for non-nullable types, but as soon as Dart had the Elvis-operator (e.g. a?.b?.c evaluates null if any of them is null), it is easy to work with nulls. Also, there is a lot of talk about them (either as an annotation for the dart analyzer or as a language feature), so it may happen.

Mapped types are interesting indeed. In certain cases it really helps if you are operating with immutable objects, and mapping helps with that (although does not entirely solves it, because the underlying runtimes does allow changes to the object).

[throwawaydbfif]

I agree about union types. They can quickly result in insane variable declaration statements that are hard to understand.

I dislike nulls though, I always wish people would just use a flag or error handling when objects are undefined, instead of "hey this object is the flag and sometimes it's not actually an object!"

You'd think language designers would learn after dealing with null pointers :)

[willtim]

So Dart hasn't really incorporated any lessons from 20 years of Java, has it? Google's answer to Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake is... "The Elvis operator"?

[munificent]

TypeScript has some really cool type system features. Union and intersection types are fun and really handy when interacting with dynamically typed code. (If you go back through history, you'll find almost every language with union types also has a mixture of static and dynamic typing. See: Pike, Typed Racket, etc.)

Self types (the "this" in the return type) is handy.

I can see us adding some of those to Dart eventually.

Non-nullable types are great, which I've said for a very long time[1]. We are finally working to try to add them into Dart[2]. It's early still, but it looks really promising so far. It kills me that I've been saying we should do them for Dart since before TypeScript even existed and still they beat us to the punch, but hopefully we can at least catch up.

The main difference between TypeScript and Dart's type systems (and by the latter I mean strong mode[3], not the original optional type system) is that Dart's type system is actually sound.

This means a Dart compiler using strong mode can safely rely on the types being correct when it comes to dead code elimination, optimization, etc. That is not the case with TypeScript and at this point will likely never be. There is too much extant TypeScript code and JS interop is too important for TypeScript to take the jump all the way to soundness. They gain a lot of ease of adoption from soundness, but they give up some stuff too.

In addition to the above, it means they'll have a hard time hanging new language features on top of static types because the types can be wrong. With Dart, we have the ability to eventually support features like extension methods, conversions, etc. and other things which all require the types to be present and correct.

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2011/10/29/a-proposal-for-...

[2]: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/pull/28619

[3]: https://github.com/dart-archive/dev_compiler/blob/master/STR...

[fixermark]

Typescript is definitely an improvement over type-free JS, but it's still wedded to the JS type system so unfortunately, it will still let you shoot yourself in the foot in ways you might not anticipate if you have experience with other languages with a stronger type system.

For example, If you have a string-typed foo and a number-typed bar, "foo + bar" is still a valid statement in TS because they have to maintain backwards-compatibility with JS's unfortunate language design choices.

[throwawaydbfif]

Typescript and dart are completely different animals. I can leave typescript for good by compiling to js once and it's designed to output human readable code. The js it produces will be immediately usable as javascript, and I'm totally free from the semi open language that MS controls.

Dart is a different language, it has no fallback to something familiar. I don't doubt that it's many years ahead of TS in every way but it's still rather proprietary compared to TS that I can shut off at any time with minimal effort.

The openness of typescript and dart are comparable. Both being run primarily by their champion companies with code free to review and fork but with limited ability to commit changes. They both require you to sign over copyright of code committed which I don't like for my own reasons but the license is open source.

The big difference to me is that typescript offers an escape hatch and dart does not, because one is pretty much a JavaScript enhancement and the other is completely different. I hate vendor lock-in and loss of the open web in general and you will see this as a common theme to most of my more flamey(controversial) comments. The web is closing off in so many directions and as an open source developer in my free time this is of great personal concern. I don't like that hackernews and reddit can be an echo chamber and posting contrary opinions usually makes the discussion more balanced even if a lot of people don't like it.

I'm not ex google, MS, or any of the tech giants. I'm not smart or dedicated enough to work anywhere you've heard of :). Most of my comments on throwaway accounts are unpopular, that's why I don't use my normal account. I'm not some invisible super shill, hackernews knows all the accounts I use and I'm fine with that.

I've just got my own opinions and when they're controversial it's not in my best interest to comment using my normal account. It wouldn't be for anyone. It would be utterly stupid to hurt my open source projects or reputation as a developer just because somebody doesn't like my opinions. My code and my work have no opinions, and I like to keep it that way. Throwaways are my way of keeping my opinions to myself, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Separation of church and state if you will.

I'm not totally against Google or any company in general. Microsoft in particular has an extremely rocky history when it comes to open source projects. They've probably done more harm to Linux than any company in existence. If typescript and dart both had equal migration paths I would choose dart in a heartbeat. I love tsickle and the closure compiler and the fact that the angular team is using typescript. Still, I feel like my criticism of dart has some truth to it at least.

I've taken aim at Google for the past week for what they've done to the openness of Android, AMP, and dart. Am I wrong? It's hard to argue that any of Google's platforms are as open as they were a few years ago. Some of my really unpopular opinions were posted in reponse to other poster calling me FUD or a shill, and can you blame me? It's one thing to say "I disagree and this is why" but pretty rude to just say "I don't believe you because you're obviously lying or getting paid to say that". To that I say well screw you I'll post what I want without being polite at all if you're going to be so rude. I'm replying nicely to you because you genuinely asked why I used a throwaway and said that you worked with dart at Google, way more than most would admit.

Having an unpopular opinion just gets you labelled as a shill or FUD and that's a lot of the reason I use throwaways. I've actually gotten death threats before for disagreeing with people on the internet. It's hard to say I would be better off getting death threats from people that can easily find my name, occupation, and address. Look at more of my post history and you'll see that I'm probably not a shill, or a really sneaky one if you don't want to believe that.

I just bashed Intel for removing ECC support from their desktop lines a few days ago, and Facebook and Microsoft a day before that for their shittastic timeline algorithm and irrational fear of Linux taking over corporate clients respectively. A day before that I trashed PayPal for some of their recent cronyism and praised the quality of Google's Guava libraries.

In my more ancient post history I mention how much C#'s ecosystem sucks compared to java and how even open sourcing the language doesn't mean much when it only targets windows using visual studio. I bitched about the baby boomers screwing the mellenials and asked how it's possible to start a side business. I said I don't like Python because it's slow and gave people online marketing tips on how I write high ranking blog articles. I mentioned that .NET core sounds great but it's alpha quality and it sucks that I have to use the new version of Windows server to have http2 support. I talked about how WordPress is absolute shit for anything even medium traffic. Mentioned a quip about using monotonic grey codes. Brought up some arguments about montsanto and GM windblown crops. Mentioned that Uber doesn't give a fuck about their drivers and some examples of this despite their press releases saying otherwise.

I'm getting a lot of comments about how I'm some full of shit corporate mouthpiece again so I guess it's time to cycle the old throwaway again.

I'm not asking you to agree but keep in mind that some people will have opinions completely contrary to your own. Sometimes their reasoning will be logical even though you come to a different conclusion, people are just different

[isoos]

Your worries about being locked in may have been valid 2-3 years ago (1), but things have changed a lot since:

Dart has an ongoing project (Dart Developer Compiler) which has a goal, among others, to produce readable, idiomatic EcmaScript 6. That is as close to your TypeScript fallback as it can get. (2)

Somebody also demonstrated Dart to LLVM compilation is possible. The language has a decent library for parsing the Dart sources, worst case, if you are that heavily invested in your product, you could also write something that does transpile your codebase. I did try to do it on small scale and specific examples, it is actually not _that_ hard to do, if my business relied on it, it would be certainly within reach.

(1) I'm not sure if you can call it lock-in as it is entirely open source, you can fork it, build it for yourself, change it if you have special needs. The same goes for perl, php, python, go, whatever language you prefer. Yeah, most people don't do it. Why? Because most people don't need it. If you become Facebook-size, it may look better to invest in the PHP toolchain and VM than in transpilers. YMMV.

(2) From the pure technical point of view, I wouldn't call it reassuring that the default fallback platform is JavaScript for so many people (even on the server-side). It is sure depressing that we are stuck with "1" == 1 and wrong ordering of "[1, 2, 10].sort()" for as long as we fall back to JS, and TypeScript does not improve on it.

[throwawaydbfif]

I didn't know of the developer compiler, when that reaches production I won't have any real citicism of Dart.

For now Js fallback is the only realistic option for running code on the web. Even if we get native typescript or dart support tomorrow we will still need to put up with JavaScript for like 7-10 years. For this reason a readable JS fallback seems like a vital feature to me at least. It's depressing but reality for the majority of web projects.

Does dart have a pluggable compiler framework similar to Roslyn or Antlr AST's? That would make it a lot easier to write your own conversions.

One more point in Typescipt's favor though... It would be a lot easier to modify the JS VM in browsers to support native typescript than dart. In my mind it's a lot more likely to happen because of this(less work)

[munificent]

> when that reaches production I won't have any real citicism of Dart.

It's still got bugs, of course, but we have internal customers working on real projects using it on a daily basis.

I agree totally that picking a language is a huge commitment and you want to do that with an organization (company, standards committee, group of open source hackers, whatever) that you trust.

Google is a huge company and has done lots of good and bad things, so it's easy to find enough evidence to support assertions that we should or shouldn't be trusted based on whichever view you want to demonstrate.

One way I look at it is that instead of answering the absolute question "Can I trust Google to shepherd the language well?", consider the relative question "Can I trust it to shepherd the language as well or better than the maintainers of other languages I might choose?"

Assuming you've got some code to write, you have to pick some language, so the relative question is probably the pertinent one. I hope that we on the Dart team are a trustworthy pick, but different reasonable people have different comfort zones.

> Does dart have a pluggable compiler framework similar to Roslyn or Antlr AST's?

All of our stuff is open source[1], including all of our compilers and the libraries they are built on. Most of it isn't explicitly pluggable because plug-in APIs are hard and Dart in particular doesn't do dynamic loading well.

But it's all hackable, and much of it is reusable. In particular, the static analysis package[2] that we use in our IDEs also exposes a set of libraries for scanning, parsing, analyzing, etc. that you can use.

[1]: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk [2]: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/tree/master/pkg/analyzer

[isoos]

Yes, Dart has similar constructs (kernel for low-level parts, and AST and analyzer for high-level parts).

[mememachine]

Associating your real name with a controversial opinion is basically just a bad idea.

[throwawaydbfif]

Exactly. Even if you're right it won't do you any good

[skybrian]

But the thing is, you really can fork. There's nothing preventing forking. I think you're complaining about merging.

But every open source project has standards about what they merge. Try getting a patch into Linux and see what they say; it won't be a rubber stamp.

[throwawaydbfif]

Yeah, you can fork. Take AMP or Android for example.

With AMP, the instant you fork and change a single character of code it becomes incompatible because part of AMP is a verifier that makes sure only the official version is used with Google's cache. Without being able to serve your custom AMP pages from Google's AMP cache the entire point to its existence goes away. The reason? Typical "security". "Tampered" versions of AMP could "do bad things", laughable considering that vanilla web pages allow you to do absolutely anything javascript allows and google has no problem showing those pages in search results or letting them freewheel in a Chrome tab. If Google wanted AMP to be open they would have built it into their chrome browser so the browser could enforce restrictions while allowing users to run whatever customized AMP implementation they want.

And Android. Android used to honor the promise of being open. Years ago. This was before every manufacturer was encouraged to lock bootloaders, and back when platform SDK's and drivers for hardware were generally available even if they were kinda hard to get. This was also before the Android kernel heavily diverged from mainline Linux, and before "google play services" grew from a tiny app to a framework that powers half the OS features.

Nowadays you can only run your own Android on devices specifically built for it. Open distributions like CyanogenMod are dead or dying. Google Play services is closed and proprietary, and probably about 95% of popular apps require it to work. Even if you manage to get your own Android distribution built and running you will need to side load all your apps, and most apps just don't work because they've been built to depend on proprietary bits that Google has snuck in all over the place.

Google is better at the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy than Microsoft ever was. So good, in fact, that they have many well intentioned people defending them to the death even as they choke off the very open source projects they created. Virtually every platform that Google runs for more than about 5 years goes from completely open to something impractical to run yourself. If you don't believe me look into any of their older projects that are "open source".

After a certain point it's free software as in "free coupons". Somewhere in the mix, eventually, the price of of their "charity" is passed on to you.

[djsumdog]

Hardware made a big difference with Linux and its growth. It could run on PC/x86, alpha, sparc because those are platforms. ARM is a spec sold to manufactures that all have their own SoC that attach random shit to random pins and implement the worst kernel hacks that can never be upstreamed.

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

We can't have the 90s Linux revolution for handhelds because they each need customized kernels and drivers. Many fall into disrepair and go unmaintained, even in things like Cyanogen. (On two phones I tried running newer CM images on old hardware and ran into speed and performance issues).

This is why things like Plasma and Ubuntu mobile have such limited phone support. Porting is difficult.

Also notice that I said "PC" above. There are plenty of x86 systems that are just as difficult to port to (PS4, Wonderswan, those old T1 cards with 4x486 processors on them). At least Microsoft forced their ARM manufactures to use UEFI. Too bad those platforms have locked bootloaders. I'd love to see some Lumia running Plasma.

[lenkite]

First up - I do not argue with you. Android is not as open as it was in the old days. But I think its not fair to only blame Google here.

Google making Google play services was a natural reaction to manufacturers never updating Android on their phones for years leading to all kinds of vulnerabilities and bugs on Android that kept it far behind iOS in quality and features. Lets face it - Android used to be sneered at, the red-headed problem-child OS that used to the butt of jokes till it grew out of puberty and pimples in Ice Cream Sandwich. If manufacturers had truly honoured OS updates, Play Services may never have been built - it allows Google to update Android without updating the OS. And yes, they will retain full control over Play Services - I completely understand the need to fully possess it and ensure a high level of quality assurance.

Also blaming the fall of CyanogenMod on Google is ridiculous. CM fell because of mistakes made by Kirk Mc Master and several others. He attempted to be a dictator even going to the extent of banning OnePlus phones selling in India - this was fought and resolved in the courts. All goodwill for CM was destroyed. OnePlus ditched CM and moved to Oxygen OS. CM had a stroke and died. Now Lineage is the new shiny OS rising from the cooling corpse of CM.

[throwawaydbfif]

Interesting info about CM, didn't know there was more to it.

I still disagree with play services because it wouldn't be that hard to force manufacturers to support updates when you command such a large part of the market

[pjmlp]

Google is 100% to blame.

There are these things called contracts, and if there are clauses for an OEM to be allowed to have access to Google services, Google lawyers could certainly add a few more sentences regarding compulsory updates.

[sangnoir]

Android is open source, and OEMs see long-term updates as a money-losing proposal. If the "lost sales" (to them) costs outweigh the benefit of shipping Google services, OEMs will fork/ship AOSP and call it a day - they want profits more than they respect/fear Google. Google's negotiating position is not unassailable.

[ocdtrekkie]

It sounds like you have no idea how deep Google's MADA contracts with OEMs already go. =) Shipping devices with Google services included requires you sign over your entire business decisionmaking to Google: They have approval/veto power over every single device and software update you release that contains their services, and they also forbid you to sell any devices running Android that don't contain their services, just to make sure you don't try to exert any independence on the side.

Android isn't open source, except in the hearts and minds of fanboys everywhere. =)

[pjmlp]

> OEMs will fork/ship AOSP and call it a day - they want profits more than they respect/fear Google.

Good luck getting all those apps running without Google services, or getting the devs to re-written them to use alternative APIs.

It only works in countries like China because of the way the government controls everything.

I pretty much doubt anyone cares about Amazon or Jolla's fork, or cared for the Blackberry's one.

It is just about not caring one second to enforce updates.

[thunderbong]

Thank you. I wonder how many open source advocates recognize this.

[throwawaydbfif]

Thanks so much. I get a lot of downvotes and use throwaways because of comments like this, so it's nice to hear some praise every once in a while.

Google's projects all seem very inviting from a distance. Usually it's not until you're ready to implement something that you find out that you're fucked, and how.

Serious ranting below but something I never get a chance to say:

I'm a born skeptic and avoid the silicon valley mindset even though I'm a driven person. I used to find myself often in disagreement with others because they don't or refuse to see the truth. Some people don't like to be told they're wrong. Many of those will fight other opinions just to justify their own decision, but will secretly reconsider. Others will hang onto beliefs with every ounce of strength as their mistake builds into a Maelstrom that consumes everything they care about.

With some people, after challenging their beliefs, they will end a friendship rather than admit you were right in the first place. Especially if you refused to do something their way and it saved them from disaster. Some can't stand to be THAT wrong. As if I was some asshole who saved them from their fate, and now they're a spirit left wandering the earth until they can fulfill their original destiny. Its like I helped them cheat without telling them about it, stealing the joy from victory. This is something I learned the hard way more than once.

In real life I keep my opinions to myself to avoid this nastiness, and offer opinion only when asked. The people open to advice even if they disagree learn to ask my opinion since I always tend to have one. The majority of people I know, including some good friends, have no idea what my personal opinions are on many subjects. It would cause pointless pain and argument with people I care about regardless of their beliefs.

I'm not loyal to any platform or company and I will freely throw a strongly held notion to the wind if I find disturbing evidence that I was mistaken. Most people are not so malleable.

A lot of people take their beliefs too seriously to the detriment of society. At least on the internet I can express my opinion, however "uncool" using throwaways.

In the real world the best and most meticulously researched advice I've ever given is at exit interviews. The one time you can be open, honest, and politically incorrect with coworkers. Multiple companies made serious operational changes after giving my exit interview. Others have told me in nicer words "that's really fucking great to hear I'm pretty happy I never have to talk to you again".

The problem is, you never know how somebody will respond. During exit interviews I'm treated more like a person than a subordinate since the boss relationship is formally over, which helps I'm sure.

In real life, the way to influence a strongly held opinion is best decribed by watching the movie Inception. You introduce nothing more than minor inconsistencies while outwardly expressing little opinion, then wait to see if your clues are enough to lead them to towards the promised land.

My other common tactic is to do things without asking any opinions first. You at most come off as insensitive, aloof, rather than someone to intentionally disregard their advice. Usually the opinion matters less in practice than if you had asked in the first place. Classic forgiveness is easier than permission.

Ive sometimes wondered if this makes me a physcopath or if that's just how some people tick. Anyways, god bless throwaways and the internet

[Aloha]

At the risk of down votes, I'll be as blunt and honest as you claim to be - after reading this screed - you mostly come off as a someone with an inflated view of your own importance and abilities. While I might agree with you that the silicon valley mindset is harmful - anyone who would rather keep a friendship and watch a friend go over a cliff in a barrel, isn't really worth keeping around - either as a friend or an employee.

Fighting the good fight, fighting for the things that are just, and true, and good - are nearly always worth it, the key is to back off before it becomes a pyrrhic victory.

That's a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

[rusk]

I think parent poster is using the term "friend" in a more liberal sense. I would counter that anyone who you're afraid would berate you for honest feedback can't honestly be considered a "true" friend. In most cases anyway. Even then, some people just have to learn the hard way.

[throwawaydbfif]

I'll save somebody but only if it's worth the cost of losing a friend. The better the friend the more I let them learn from their mistakes. The truth is that losing a good friend would hurt us both more than helping them mend the wounds after smaller stuff.

It's not being evil or that I'm always right. The comment was mostly in reference to those that have been calling me a shill the past few days and how they should keep in mind that their opinion is not fact.

I gave up the good fight years ago. The worst was when I helped turn around a failing small business. We all wanted the same goal, the company to be successful. It sucked so bad that I learned that it's better to be nice to your friends than to dedicate yourself to a cause or try to fix all their problems.

If that means letting them fall sometimes that's okay, as long as you don't let them get any deeper than you can reach. If you help pull them out in the end you're still a good friend.

So the company turnaround, it worked in the long run but at great cost. Cutting employees that sucked at their jobs but were friends and helped us with the initial plan. Cutting moochers that I loved but were sucking the company dry with constant unscheduled time off and freebies. Redoing our systems to automate as much as possible made us our first profit in years but a lot of that was from jobs eliminated. Hiring people of a higher caliber than existing employees by raising application requirements above what most of the current employees would meet. Offering our new more qualified people more money than Bob who's been here for 15 years but did our financials on pieces of scrap paper.

By the end of that process a few years later, my lesson was that I made the owners a lot of money at the expense of losing about half my friends. Most of the other half resented me for what I had done and thought I was a traitor, even though I had just helped implement exactly what we had agreed upon a few years back.

We planned to cut dead weight and streamline and automate operations. To add new talent with up to date skills. To cut our benefits slightly to money to invest in the company's future. Everyone wanted this until it was their benefits or their job being automated. I followed through with the cause and at the end I felt like a Judas figure and packed up and left in shame.

You could say it was a pyrrhic victory for sure, but after that I'm very wary to set anything in motion that's too heavy for me to stop on my own

[rusk]

I agree with a lot of your sentiments and am only responding to rubbish your psychopath claims. I don't think you need to worry, in particular if you don't exhibit cruel or violent tendencies. You demonstrate concrete moral reasoning, even if at odds with others, so not sociopathic. "Psychotic" perhaps but your reasoning seems lucid enough. The one reservation I would have is about your "omega man" mentality; that you could be suffering unescessary mental anguish as a result. Also if I were operating an online community I'd be somewhat concerned with your obvert circumvention of moderation checks and balances using throw aways etc. However - I think you're submitting perfectly valid opinions in a respectful way and I share your unease at how there seems to be a groupthink at play shaping the quality of discussion.

[throwawaydbfif]

Hahaha psychotic ish ramblings are fun to write sometimes though :). I'm about to retire this throwaway so IDGAF about what I'm writing as much as usual.

Omega Man is an interesting term, never heard of that before. You're totally right that it's how I try to operate but only when I'm doing controversial things. Perhaps I'm doing it right if I seem to be going about it in the most quiet and passive way possible :) .

You don't have to worry about me running any communities online. I'm a productive member on a bunch of online communities including HN and I don't use my throwaways to respond to, upvote, or otherwise sockpuppet my regular account except a couple times I admittedly may have upvoted the same thread on different accounts by mistake. Most of my less opinionated stuff is under my real name

The only reason I respond sometimes is because I disagree. Sometimes my controversial opinions prove to be a lot more popular than I thought. And possibly miraculously, all of my throwaways eventually gather substantial positive karma despite the fire and brimstone rained upon some of my comments :)

[fixermark]

This reduces to the old argument that the Four Freedoms model of open-source software is basically moot in a world where the value of software is dominated by network effect, not modifiability.

It continues to be a weakness of the Four Freedoms model.

[flukus]

> This was also before the Android kernel heavily diverged from mainline Linux, and before "google play services" grew from a tiny app to a framework that powers half the OS features.

How diverged is it? Would the ever be merged back together?

[throwawaydbfif]

Last I checked some devices were running mainline kernels many years old, like 2011, with zero code back to mainline. One of the other posters mentioned rampant hacks to the kernel to get things to work in stupid ways which I've heard a lot of as well.

Android is missing a ton of new Linux features on many devices and the kernel is getting increasingly unusable by ARM devices in vanilla form because of these badly done third party modifications

[mswift42]

Can you name one open source project, where I can commit a change the maintainer doesn't agree with?

[bitmapbrother]

WTF are you talking about? Dart is being used to develop apps on their Fuchsia OS.

[netheril96]

If Dart ever became the real thing, it must be supported in not just Google Chrome, but also Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc. At that point Google will lose its control.

[afsina]

Google has decided not to put Dart VM in Chrome long ago. Of course Dart tools has very strong web development support and JS conversion.

[frik]

Microsoft is lobbying to get their favorite syntax into JS6/7. Who wanted the class syntax? etc And TypeScript and WebAssembly are part of their plan. Ultimately, they want to recompile their 27 year old Office codebase from C/C++ to web browser.

[caltelt]

To be fair, it seems to me like the typical webdev coming from C#/Java really wants the class syntax. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's just MS that's pushing it through, and even if it is, there's definitely an audience for it.

[throwawaydbfif]

I've used a ton of languages over the years and vastly prefer Java type syntax when working on larger projects. The forced organization tends to lead towards some level of mandatory code clarity. Something greatly lacking in Js land.

OO is a bad word these days and functional is all the rage, even though functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering.

There's a huge push to put more structured language concepts into js now that it's being used for substantial projects and it's out of necessity more than convenience.

When I'm hacking together a quick Python script all that stuff gets in the way but when working on larger systems strong typing and object syntax are practically a neccesary evil for maintaining readability

[klibertp]

> strong typing and object syntax are practically a neccesary evil for maintaining readability

No, it's not like that.

You can write readable code in any language as long as you can write readable code. It sounds tautologic, but what I mean is that ability to write readable code is a skill separate from writing code or knowing a particular language.

Strong static typing - as just about any tool and language feature - can have both good and bad effects on code readability. In the end, the readability (so also maintainability and other related metrics) depends on the skill of a particular developer in the largest part.

Both OO and FP techniques, as well as all the language features, are the same. You can misuse (or ignore) them all.

What we need is to make an "average developer" better at writing code, not more bondage and discipline in our tools. The latter is (a lot) easier, so that's where we focus our efforts, but - in my opinion - it's not going to solve the problem.

[bertrand-caron]

Could you elaborate on how "functional languages were largely superceded by OO languages eons ago for many reasons people are slowly redicovering" ?

[throwawaydbfif]

Erlang and common lisp have been around for a long time, and functional programming is nothing new. The reality is that most business problems map conceptually to communication between objects, and that IDE's which greatly help developer productivity work a lot better with objects.

Functional programming has origins in lambda calculus and academia because mathematical problems map more easily from pure math to functional programming. It's really popular in the circles where it's more useful/easier than OO.

Honestly I don't think the people 20 years ago chose OO for most business languages over functional out of ignorance. They had a choice and decided that OO was better for business problem solving languages like Java even though a large majority of programmers from that era were math majors and familiar with functional syntax.

I feel like we're in one of those cycles where a large number of a previous generation have retired and it's time to learn some of these lessons all over again.

Notice how many wood commercial buildings have been going up in the last 15-20 years? A lot, and just long enough after everyone involved in all the great city fires of WW2 to be too dead to object.

[fmap]

Who "choose" OO 20 years ago and (much more importantly) why?

I'm going to ignore the social component... that said, we work in a wonderful profession where the world is changing completely every decade and many design decisions from the previous generation make no sense anymore. The business case for developing your application in COBOL rather than Common Lisp may have been sound 20 years ago, but today many of the reason why you didn't choose lisp are invalid (e.g., garbage collection takes milliseconds rather than seconds).

Note that this is not the case in more mature fields such as construction.