I think you're going to be a bit disappointed. Dart isn't a brand new language, its more like "better javascript". You might as well go Microsoft, and use their Typescript.

In both cases its like more lipstick, same pig.

Microsoft has Typescript. Don't expect them to embrace Dart anytime soon.

it is, so there needs to be a compelling reason to get rid of javascript in favour of something else. A new language that is a bit like javascript anyway, and gets translated to javascript for most browsers anyway is really not it.

Now, if they could get native performance standardised and included in the major browsers I think people would be interested.
If they had a way to compile new controls into native binaries that could be dropped in a html form, maybe we'd be interested (I know,. ActiveX, but imagine it could be done right).

Dart... is nothing particularly exciting at all. Its a waste of effort. Standardise NaCl and get it out there for all, and maybe you'll have something. Dart, na.

nothing really wrong with Python, it just needs curly brackets so you could escape from the indentation if you need or want to. Its not a big deal I think, and probably the only stopping it from happening is political.

I guess the old days we ignored the "cool new stuff" until it had proven itself capable. I don't know why that has changed - probably the web hyping crap at us from some corporate marketing department.

In particular I find Microsoft the worst offender. I mean, once upon a time we used ODBC to connect to databases. Then they came up with DAO, or Jet, or RDO, or ADO, OLEDB, or ADO.NET, or Linq2SQL, or EF or Native Client, or now they're preferred standard ... ODBC.

Or just ask any Silverlight developer what they think.

What we used to do years ago was basically stick to the tooling we knew and what would now be a new tool or framework was described in terms of documentation - a kind of "this is how you do it" article.

I know we have to have some development in technologies - but we don't have that, we have churn instead.

For web development, was old CGI perl that bad? Not really. Was PHP better? possibly. Was Perl scripts so bad that we had to change it all to PHP., then Java, then Python, then Ruby, then Node.js and now... I'm not sure what's flavour-of-the-month now. Probably ASP.NET MVC 5 with the MVVMMVM patttern.

You see, the difference is not that we have the tools that allow you to spend 20 hours throwing something together, you have a totally different stack that takes just as long as it used to.

but that statement suggests a reasonable ability to communicate your thoughts, so therefore you are not socially clueless and thus disprove yourself.

as if programming should be something any idiot off the street can do cheaply.

TFTFY. CEOs gotta have a bigger bonus after all, and you don't get that by paying staff what they're really worth.

No, he has a point. Back in the day, we had few tools and we learned how to use them.

now, we have a tool for every hour of the week, and as soon as you've mastered one, someone comes along and says "your skills are sooo obsolete, you must learn now or fall behind", so you get to grips with it and start top master it, and then realise its a pile of poop and hunt around for a new, cooler tech to use instead.

Software projects today are littered with the corpses of technology that was the silver bullet to make your life as a developer so much better, easier and productive. Constantly.

That's the problem - we're not productive, we spend all our time learning new crap that is little better than the ancient stuff we used to use and got stuff done with.

The tools, well I know people who swear vim is easier to use than the latest IDE that has full intellisense and refactoring builtin, and they are probably right - in that they have learned their craft using that tool and actually are more productive than the bloated and slow IDE could make them. The trouble is that newbies start with the IDE and don't know anything else, so they stay in the "its easy" camp and never progress to real masters of their art. Which is understandable when you need to re-skill every couple of years, but not beneficial to the software industry.

it's probably in a cardboard box in cupboard somewhere, between some smallpox virus and the Ark of the Covenant.

there is no such thing as an error in indentation in other languages. Indentation is simply whitespace added as a guide for the programmer and is entirely optional.

So

if (a) do_b();

is exactly the same as

if (a)
    do_b();

which is exactly the same as

if (a)
\tdo_b();

I think python as an introductory language is good as it forces the learner to understand indentation as a good thing, but in the real world its less useful and more a straitjacket that can be bad. For example, when adding some new code I will often put it at the beginning of the line (ie with no indent) so I can see it more clearly whilst coding (usually this is for temporary tracing lines), and only indent it before commit. Sometimes a big block of switches is much more clearly laid out like my first example.

None of these causes errors in readability of the code, which is really what indentation should be all about. Good for python enforcing this, but bad of python for not offering the curly-brace alternative when you need it.

which college was that as it seems to have grasped the concept of teaching.

what do you mean, picking up steam - Enterprise (those who are Windows shops of course) use C# extensively.

However - think of it like this. Ten years ago, you'd be the one saying Visual Basic is the most widely used language in enterprise, so we should be teaching kids that. And today, those kids would be coming out of college knowing all about VB6 (note, schools don't change curriculums overnight, it takes a long time for them to realise, and even longer to implement change - Java was popular in 1996 which is when it started to gain traction in university departments).

So, I hope this shows you the fallacy of teaching using "what enterprise wants now". You need to teach what will stand the kids in good stead for the future, that teaches them fundamental programming concepts that they can use their knowledge to apply to other languages. Personally I think they should teach a language that no-one uses in industry. Pascal (or Oberon) or something dedicated for teaching.

Oh, and that only applies to Windows shops, non-windows people don't use C#.

true, but all those HTML elements tend to get laid out in increasingly complex divs, with a whole heap of CSS added.

I was really referring to the javascript "controls" that are html elements with a huge heap of javascript behind them providing functionality.

I'd like to see webgl + native code running in the browser as a standard, probably based on a superset of C so anything else can be implemented in it.

but if your browser+js+html5 is so good at providing fast, standards-based 3D... why can't it run Crysis?

3d is more accelerated than 2d - its faster simply becuase the graphics cards practically only do 3d stuff now. 2d, there for desktop windows as almost an afterthought.

Some systems (eg Direct2d) are built on top of 3d graphics stacks, you just have a flat projection and no depth co-ordinates to give the impression of a 2d graphics surface.

So you see WebGL is significantly faster than HTML drawing, which is why it might be a good thing overall... the problem comes with replacing a well known standard with god-knows-what graphics drawing. Hopefully it'll settle down, and maybe one day we'll get a C-style logic that draws WebGL graphics in a browser as a standard.

And then someone will replace it with something else.