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0 pointssatvikpendem3y ago0 comments

Backwards compatibility is overrated, sticking to it too hard is how we get stuff like JS or C++ that have ten different ways of doing the same thing. I'd much rather a language be improved and break sometimes than to convolve around keeping strict BC. Anyway, they have good BC support since Dart 2 released several years ago so I'm not worried.

With your Java example, that's exactly what I mean, you don't need 4 different tools in Dart to achieve the 4 types of compilation, they're all included in the standard Dart compiler/SDK. Sure, if we go by your definition, probably any language has some level of support for each via various random compilers but I'm talking about something first-class, built-in.

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kaba03y ago

> Backwards compatibility is overrated, sticking to it too hard

While there is surely a very delicate balance of slowly deprecating a few things, remember that the only significant productivity booster is relying on existing code (as per Brooks).

I’m fairly sure there are orders of magnitude more Java code transpiled to JS running at Google than all of their Dart codebases combined, so not sure “random compilers” are a fair description.

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0 pointssatvikpendem3y ago0 comments

0 comments

kaba03y ago

> Backwards compatibility is overrated, sticking to it too hard

While there is surely a very delicate balance of slowly deprecating a few things, remember that the only significant productivity booster is relying on existing code (as per Brooks).

I’m fairly sure there are orders of magnitude more Java code transpiled to JS running at Google than all of their Dart codebases combined, so not sure “random compilers” are a fair description.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse