Google Dart :NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Let's begin with the good news. Google's Dart is a modern, full-featured tool designed by grabbing the best features of Java, JavaScript, and C. The development team is obviously large, and the samples show they have the ambition and talent to create a system that will power desktop, mobile, and browser applications in the future. The tools are real, and the path to gaining widespread acceptance is one that Google can travel. The platform works.

There really isn't any obvious bad news, but there is plenty of cold, hard reality that appears after one plays with the code for a bit. The documentation is upbeat and highlights how Dart is fixing the pet peeves of the Dart creators -- peeves that many of us probably share. But the Dart developers are not superhumans, and they did not find new breakthroughs to taming the way that software turns into a jungle of vines. At best, it's not even clear that they did more than remove some hard corners and smooth over some rough edges. Their fixes work for them, but like all fixes in laws and software, they're bound to create new problems down the road.

Not all of the moves will have this effect. Almost everyone I know who writes JavaScript for the Web also uses a library like jQuery to smooth out the differences among browsers. I'm sure every one of them also wonders why someone hasn't made jQuery part of the official JavaScript spec or permanently baked it into the browser.

The developers of Dart heard these cries and added most of the goodness from these libraries to Dart. They've gotten rid of the lengthy names like getElementsByTagName and replaced them with a catch-all function called query that takes jQuery-like parameters to find what you want.

They've also smoothed out the internal data structures describing the DOM. The fields of each DOM element now use standard data structures. That means you don't need to remember method calls like hasChildNodes and firstChild. You just need to know that there's a field "node" that responds to the standard collection methods. These seem like perfectly obvious solutions and I'm thrilled with them.