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Dart is such an amazing language. I really wish it gained traction in more industries.

mdhb 1y ago
Agreed, one of my pass the time activities during covid was basically just spending the year trying out and evaluating different languages across a whole range of different metrics and features. For me Dart was the clear winner and I’ve never once regretted making it my new default, in fact it’s only increased its gap compared to everything else in the time since then.
sabellito 1y ago
Genuine question: what do you think is amazing about the language?
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Tooling, to start with. First party lsp and plugins for IntelliJ, VSCode, formatter, test, Flutter, etc. It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way.
  - als0 1y ago
    > It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way. I am struggling hard to imagine how any greatness could be achieved from that. Can you say a bit more?
    - gbalduzzi 1y ago
      Dart allows you to write compact and clean code, like GO. Dart properly supports classes and is feature-rich, like Java. I think those are the main points for the above comment
      - owebmaster 1y ago
        I think we know what made it not popular then
      - vhantz 1y ago
        Compact and clean is very far from my experience writing a very simple library management app with flutter. The framework literally gets in the way. You can't do anything without having to deal with some convoluted callback mechanism. You can't manipulate any object without some forced async crap. And it's so verbose. Despite my best efforts to keep things clean and organized, I get lost in the very small codebase after a couple of weeks. It's got to the point where I'm just rewriting it with Qt quick instead. It was my first time touching both flutter and dart, so maybe it's all subjective, but right now I think it's just a badly designed language/framework.
      - homebrewer 1y ago
        We must have very different definitions of compact, with Go requiring dozens of lines of boilerplate where other languages make do with one line of '?' or '.filter'.
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Amazing tooling meets more than okay language.
- mdhb 1y ago
  Tooling, documentation, language design, balance across a million different competing goals, interoperability, deployability, simplicity, expressivity and much more. It’s just a REALLY REALLY nice modern language with a team of very smart people behind it who very clearly sweat the small details and have a long history of being able to make great decisions along the way even in ambiguous situations where it’s not always clear what the best path is going to be.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
agilob 1y ago
In two companies we already gave up on Dart and Flutter because of how it's backwards incompatible is. The language and frameworks moves very fast, it develops new tools and classes before the old ones become mature enough and adopted by the industry. Then suddenly, Flutter 27 lands, requires Dart 45, which requires intl 81.2.5. and now you can't compile anything anymore. Whole upgrade process, tools, compiles and libraries are broken for months before Google and OSS catches up. Once ecosystem is on Flutter 27 your upgrade path takes weeks, because a core method was renamed or compiler flag removed and CI/CD is failing. So you just move back to Java and Kotlin, where code from 2012 still compiles and works just fine.
- mhoad 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - quaintdev 1y ago
    I developed this app few years agon in Flutter. I can't build it anymore. I can fix my own codebase but it shows issues in dependencies https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor
  - hamaluik 1y ago
    I released two apps built in dart on flutter. I loved it at the time, but I ran into this issue headlong with both of them. Release v1.0, move on to other things, come back in a year with a new computer to fix a minor bug and I can’t even compile the original release anymore, and had to spend forever rejiggering everything to get it back to the state it was when I left it. I really loved dart, and even flutter, building in it was a breeze. But the churn made the js ecosystem look slow.
  - justin66 1y ago
    You don't get to very rudely accuse someone of giving "fake examples" (why?) and then, later, use weasel words like "in my experience." Perhaps your experience isn't representative of everyone else's.

mdhb 1y ago

Agreed, one of my pass the time activities during covid was basically just spending the year trying out and evaluating different languages across a whole range of different metrics and features. For me Dart was the clear winner and I’ve never once regretted making it my new default, in fact it’s only increased its gap compared to everything else in the time since then.

sabellito 1y ago

Genuine question: what do you think is amazing about the language?

wiseowise 1y ago
Tooling, to start with. First party lsp and plugins for IntelliJ, VSCode, formatter, test, Flutter, etc. It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way.
- als0 1y ago
  > It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way. I am struggling hard to imagine how any greatness could be achieved from that. Can you say a bit more?
  - gbalduzzi 1y ago
    Dart allows you to write compact and clean code, like GO. Dart properly supports classes and is feature-rich, like Java. I think those are the main points for the above comment
    - owebmaster 1y ago
      I think we know what made it not popular then
    - vhantz 1y ago
      Compact and clean is very far from my experience writing a very simple library management app with flutter. The framework literally gets in the way. You can't do anything without having to deal with some convoluted callback mechanism. You can't manipulate any object without some forced async crap. And it's so verbose. Despite my best efforts to keep things clean and organized, I get lost in the very small codebase after a couple of weeks. It's got to the point where I'm just rewriting it with Qt quick instead. It was my first time touching both flutter and dart, so maybe it's all subjective, but right now I think it's just a badly designed language/framework.
    - homebrewer 1y ago
      We must have very different definitions of compact, with Go requiring dozens of lines of boilerplate where other languages make do with one line of '?' or '.filter'.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Amazing tooling meets more than okay language.
mdhb 1y ago
Tooling, documentation, language design, balance across a million different competing goals, interoperability, deployability, simplicity, expressivity and much more. It’s just a REALLY REALLY nice modern language with a team of very smart people behind it who very clearly sweat the small details and have a long history of being able to make great decisions along the way even in ambiguous situations where it’s not always clear what the best path is going to be.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

agilob 1y ago

In two companies we already gave up on Dart and Flutter because of how it's backwards incompatible is. The language and frameworks moves very fast, it develops new tools and classes before the old ones become mature enough and adopted by the industry. Then suddenly, Flutter 27 lands, requires Dart 45, which requires intl 81.2.5. and now you can't compile anything anymore. Whole upgrade process, tools, compiles and libraries are broken for months before Google and OSS catches up. Once ecosystem is on Flutter 27 your upgrade path takes weeks, because a core method was renamed or compiler flag removed and CI/CD is failing. So you just move back to Java and Kotlin, where code from 2012 still compiles and works just fine.

mhoad 1y ago
[flagged]
- quaintdev 1y ago
  I developed this app few years agon in Flutter. I can't build it anymore. I can fix my own codebase but it shows issues in dependencies https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor
- hamaluik 1y ago
  I released two apps built in dart on flutter. I loved it at the time, but I ran into this issue headlong with both of them. Release v1.0, move on to other things, come back in a year with a new computer to fix a minor bug and I can’t even compile the original release anymore, and had to spend forever rejiggering everything to get it back to the state it was when I left it. I really loved dart, and even flutter, building in it was a breeze. But the churn made the js ecosystem look slow.
- justin66 1y ago
  You don't get to very rudely accuse someone of giving "fake examples" (why?) and then, later, use weasel words like "in my experience." Perhaps your experience isn't representative of everyone else's.