Thanks for explaining the process. I like Google's evolutionary approach, but it sounds chaotic to someone like me from a Microsoft background. The top down command hierarchical structures appear to be losing all over to the networked evolutionary approaches, so I have no complaints. But I wonder, does that mean someone inside Google could use TypeScript? This might be a blind spot.
Also, I meant it will be interesting if no team chooses to use Dart on the client, but it gains interest on the server. Presumably teams go with what makes sense and that will be interesting to watch.
> I think people need to chill out and stop aggressing against anything that threatens Javascript hegemony
They have over the last 6 months as more and more people are realizing that pure JavaScript is not entirely suitable for large scale applications that are becoming more common. As someone said, the efforts to make it so are 'heroic,' but obviously the hard way to do things, like choosing to write a large application in assembly language. Having done that once, I would never do it again, and would take someone who said this was best less seriously.
Believe it or not, there's some internal projects done in LISP and Haskell. Obviously there are limits to what you can do. If you work on some new big customer facing project, it's a lot harder to get a big team of people to agree to use Haskell, but if you are working on a 20% project, it's a lot easier to just use whatever you want.
With Google production servers, there's only a few "approved" languages. I can't just go deploy a Rails app in one of Google's datacenters, for good reason, especially when you consider security.
With app-engine or compute-engine there's slightly more freedom.
I worked in Dart for a few months and loved it, but recently had to look for something else for older browser support. I started writing code in TypeScript a few days ago and, face palm, why didn't anyone think of this sooner? Visual Studio with TypeScript and jQuery type definitions gives me most of what I need from Dart (80/20 rule). It's really fun to code with. JavaScript with types feels like a sunny day. I've been complaining a little about Dart js-interop (size and speed) and now feel my instincts were right; if Google doesn't fix js-interop, then I'm struggling right now trying to understand why I should use Dart, unless Google is more clear about a different use case for Dart on the client (Android.) If all the JavaScript 'Ninjas' discover TypeScript and have the same reaction I just did, then Dart is going to struggle on the client because it doesn't operate well in the current JavaScript eco-system like TypeScript does. Someone high up in the company and outside the Dart team needs to make a strong statement about where the Dart VM is going before the window closes.
Also, I meant it will be interesting if no team chooses to use Dart on the client, but it gains interest on the server. Presumably teams go with what makes sense and that will be interesting to watch.
> I think people need to chill out and stop aggressing against anything that threatens Javascript hegemony
They have over the last 6 months as more and more people are realizing that pure JavaScript is not entirely suitable for large scale applications that are becoming more common. As someone said, the efforts to make it so are 'heroic,' but obviously the hard way to do things, like choosing to write a large application in assembly language. Having done that once, I would never do it again, and would take someone who said this was best less seriously.