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I just heard about Dart (via Seth Ladd and Edd), a new Web programming language from Google. It aims to fulfil the role Javascript currently has, only doing it better. On the pro side, new languages are inherently cool, and Javascript can be a real pain. On the con side it seems unlikely that any browsers other than Chrome will support it in the foreseeable future, except potentially via translation to Javascript, i.e. This Page Best Viewed with Chrome

It's hard not to see echoes of the old Microsoft arrogantly pushing it's own product here (remember VBScript?), although Google have in recent years made NIH an artform. But who cares about politics, how's this going to affect the Web?

Well, Code-on-Demand does appear in Fielding's thesis (slightly bizarrely as an 'optional constraint') and has been around since the early days. Pluggable clients are certainly a good idea, and Google have been leaders in moving Rich Internet Applications as opaque desktop apps into the browser using Javascript. The apps are still pretty opaque (View Source on gmail if you doubt that) but they do at least more-or-less run cross-browser.

I've not read much of the Dart docs yet, not tried it at all, but first impressions are that it's a nice clean syntax not unlike JS (or for that matter Java, C# or Python...) and they've already got a good bunch of libs together (even if they do include RPC, yuck!).

As an aside, it should be noted that there's a cost to the standardization of today's browser as Web client (in the process of being defined via HTML5 and associated APIs). It does mean an effective monoculture of HTTP clients. Arguably you can write whatever kind of client you like (probably in Javascript) and host it inside a browser, but they have been optimized for a fairly specific app scope. If you stray from the general model of a Web of HTML Documents you're in for an uphill journey. The arbitrary desktop client has more freedom to use HTTP more creatively, but then there won't be one on everyone's desktop. (Personally I like the notion of Web agents (where an agent = client + server + persistence + code) as an abstraction for Web components, as in "Two Webs!" [pdf - heh]. I wonder, is there a HTTP server in Dart yet?)

Looking at the "Leaked internal dart email" (as with UK politics, it's probably sensible to take the "Leaked" aspect with a pinch of salt), there does seem to be some motivation for Dart coming in response to the success of iOS. I'm pretty sure a new language isn't the best response to this, but it certainly makes a change to the usual big proprietary Flash/Silverlight kind of issues. Google are still talking of evolving Javascript, but it does raise the question of what Dart will offer that couldn't be achieved using JS. Optional typing is the feature they seem to be plugging most. So I wondered if anyone had worked on adding static types to JS. Funnily enough, the first few hits refer to iOS. Oh dear, we're really not talking iOS envy, are we?

It's a little surprising that Google haven't thrown their expertise at the JS-is-a-mess issue previously, I don't see a groundbreaking dev tool and pattern library out there (funnily enough the Dart Editor is based on Eclipse, which does seem a bit un-groundbreaking (although I'm not criticising the choice, Eclipse is my main IDE)).

Whatever, it should be interesting to watch how this pans out. Dart will almost certainly be a very cool language, albeit engendering ambivalence everywhere outside Google. Give me a shout when it includes libs for non-HTML Web languages (i.e. gimmee RDF :)

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