On: Swift: Google’s Bet on Differentiable Programming

[earthboundkid]

I was looking into Dart the other day because I guess Google is insisting on using it for Flutter and… it's someone in 2011's idea of a better JavaScript, except it's worse than modern ES2020 JavaScript? Why would anyone prefer Dart to modern JS/TypeScript? It's just not as good.

[gundmc → earthboundkid]

Dart has gotten better, but agreed that the overall developer experience with TypeScript is far ahead - especially with vscode.

[earthboundkid → gundmc]

I just was looking at their code samples on the website, and I was really unimpressed with it. Why learn a new language if there’s nothing distinctive or better about it, you know? It’s just a better ES5 and a worse TypeScript.

[pjmlp → earthboundkid]

Only if you need to ship something with Flutter, the last attempt to rescue Dart.

However it still remains to be seen how long they will fund the team.

Chrome team cares about PWAs and Android team about JetPack Composer, and eventually having it compatible with Kotlin/Native (for iOS).

So it is still a big question mark why bother with Flutter, specially when it still lacks several usable production ready plugins for native features.