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by sethladd 4102 days ago
Dart is much more full-featured than CoffeeScript. Dart is a completely new language, with much improved semantics. Dart has features such as method cascades, mixins, async/await, optional types, a rich core library, factory constructors, libraries, named parameters, lexical this, Futures, implicit interfaces, generics, and lots more.

[disclaimer: I'm on the Dart team]
2 comments
bhouston 4102 days ago
I am not saying Dart and CoffeeScript are comparable in terms of features -- not at all, rather I am saying that both Dart and CoffeeScript have served similar purposes in showing where the JavaScript language can evolve towards in the future.
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kybernetikos 4102 days ago
On the other hand, persuing the strategy that Google did with Dart distracted people and effort from the important task of actually improving javascript, so it may well have been a net negative.
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nathan_long 4101 days ago
If they'd succeeded in replacing it, there would have been no need to fix it. It's a big task, but I wish they'd succeeded and hope they (and/or others) try again.

Whether you like JS or don't, I think we can all agree that it stinks to have only one choice for client-side scripting.

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nailer 4102 days ago
ES7 has async/await. Coffee script has a tighter syntax despite being older than Dart. Typescript has optional types and is being used at both Microsoft and Google. Also: you don't think JS has libraries and mixins?
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skybrian 4102 days ago
How about: "ES7 will most likely have async/await when it's finished."

Sorry, using the present tense for things that will be in browsers years later (hopefully) is a common practice that's an issue with me. Let's stick with what people can actually use today.

Also, pointing to features people can use in different dialects of JavaScript is not really fair. Just about everything you can think of has been experimented with and probably deployed somewhere. It doesn't count unless it's all available in the same toolchain and can be used in a unified way while writing a single app.

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bhouston 4102 days ago
> Sorry, using the present tense for things that will be in browsers years later (hopefully) is a common practice that's an issue with me. Let's stick with what people can actually use today.

ES7 async/wait is available now via the ES7 polyfill Babel.js: http://babeljs.io/

There are a ton of polyfills available right now for ES6/ES7 features: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es7/

BTW I also think that the current state of aggressive polyfills is also influenced by Dart's compile to JS functionality. :)

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skybrian 4102 days ago
Comparing Babel.js to dart2js is fair. I'd be interested in hearing more about about how well it works in practice from people who use Babel.js for large apps. (Also, how does it compare to Typescript?)
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spellboots 4102 days ago
Anyone creating a new Ember.js application today is using babel by default. It works very well in my experience. I haven't used typescript however.
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bhouston 4102 days ago
I think with time Typescript and Babel.js are to be merged, if you through in Strong Script to the mix I guess you have the future of JavaScript.
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have_humility 4102 days ago
> Sorry, using the present tense for things that will be in browsers years later (hopefully) is a common practice that's an issue with me. Let's stick with what people can actually use today.

If that's the metric we're applying, Dart fares no better...

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spankalee 4102 days ago
How so? You can use Dart today and yesterday and tomorrow.
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spankalee 4102 days ago
wycats: IE 10 and up, Safari 6 and up, Chrome, FF, Opera, last 2 versions.
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wycats 4102 days ago
In what browser?
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wstrange 4102 days ago
Chrome, Firefox, Safari and even IE!

All via dart2js

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kyllo 4102 days ago
Typescript has optical types

What are optical types? I've never heard of this term and Google turned up nothing on it.

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untog 4102 days ago
100% sure it's a typo of "optional types".
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hibbelig 4102 days ago
How boring :-) I'd love to look forward to a language with optical types. I'm sure it's at least as interesting as operand overloading in Intercal.
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hmsimha 4102 days ago
Optical typing must be like duck typing taken to the extreme. If it looks like a duck then it's a duck, dammit!
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girvo 4102 days ago
Type coercion taken way too far ;)
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kyllo 4102 days ago
I was imagining something like Lens in Haskell :)
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DonHopkins 4102 days ago
Optical types are when they shave the bushy hair off of the type system, and it looks an inch longer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsbXwzqlqsU

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moron4hire 4102 days ago
The types aren't optional. The types are always there. The type annotations are optional.
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