Steve Fenton

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Thursday, 15th December 2011

On 15th October I wrote an Introduction to Dart, a language that Google hoped might replace ECMAScript (commonly referred to as JavaScript). I like some of the ideas behind Dart - start afresh and create a scripting language for The Web that takes the good parts from JavaScript and polishes some of the rough edges.

The problem is that there is a reasonable force of opposition that could make it really hard for Dart to get wide adoption.

For starters, Microsoft are supporting the idea of improving JavaScript rather than just ditching it - and there are similar thoughts on the WebKit discussion boards.

When you consider the fact that many web developers are still unsure of whether to adopt HTML5, despite the fact that browser vendors are all committed to supporting it - how can we expect people to adopt Dart if if leaves us with support only in some browsers? If you end up having to compile Dart into JavaScript to support browsers, why not learn JavaScript and be closer to the code.

Dart isn't dead yet, but with a specification at version 0.06 and a general feeling that it isn't going to make it into all browsers it is going to be a hard slog to get people on board.

Maybe if Google let you write Android apps in Dart it would get sufficient adoption amongst app developers to eventually convince people to add it into their web browsers as a scripting language.