Google releases early preview of its programming language Dart

PanARMENIAN.Net - A while back Google allowed it to be known that it was proposing a second new language in addition to Go, CNET reports.

The Dart language was later revealed to be a JavaScript replacement. It seemed that Google had decided the JavaScript just wasn't up to the job of building the web apps of the future and had decided to work towards its replacement rather than improvement - hence Dart: a language for structured web programming.

The design goals of Dart are stated as: create a structured yet flexible language for web programming, make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn and ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

JavaScript isn't class-based and this tends to annoy and confuse programmers brought up in the class-based language tradition of C++, Java and C#, say. It doesn't however mean that a non-class based approach is necessarily wrong for the web or for a dynamic language.

Class-based languages generally impose strong typing, but such is the need to balance ease of use and dynamic aspects of the language that Dart is optionally typed.

Functions are just functions and not objects and the language is single threaded. There are no namespace or modules and nothing much to aid large scale program development other than optional typing.

As far as Dart goes, there seems to be nothing new. It is just the same old class-based, object-oriented language with optional typing to make it easier for beginners.