The Dart programming language has created in 2011. I hadn’t looked at Dart in a long time so I figured I’d install it and run a “Hello World” program to refresh my memory.

Dart was intended to be a replacement for JavaScript. “Dart” is not an acronym. (Google originally was creating “Dash” as a replacement language but somewhere along the line the name changed to Dart.) The problems with JavaScript are well known. One year after Google released Dart, the TypeScript language was released by Microsoft in order to solve the same problems. TypeScript is now quite popular and is used far more often then Dart.

Originally it was hoped that browsers would be modified so that they’d be able to consume and run Dart language scripts directly but those plans folded and so Dart is now often transpiled into JavaScript. Dart programs can also run on a machine that has the Dart Virtual Machine (VM) installed. And it’s possible to compile Dart into native executables for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but that’s a rare, niche scenario.

I installed the chocolatey package manage for Windows and then used it to install the Dart language SDK, which also included a runtime.

I wrote a short Dart program and ran it directly. In most situations Dart code is transpiled into JavaScript and used in a Web client.

In short, Dart is one of many attempts to replace JavaScript that didn’t completely work out.

Dart was nearly dead and buried when some engineers at Google decided to use Dart when they created a library named Flutter. Flutter is mostly used to create UIs for mobile applications. Flutter became very popular and that gave Dart a new lease on life.

Installing Dart on Windows involved: 1.) upgrading my .NET Framework to version 4.5 or greater, 2.) installing a package manager named chocolatey, 3.) using chocolatey to install the Dart SDK. I had no major problems, but I’ve installed systems such as this many times before. A beginner would probably have quite a bit of trouble.

The syntax of Dart is very much like JavaScript. I didn’t spend much time looking at the documentation because I mostly wanted to get an overall feel for Dart.

The state of Web development continues to be an unmitigated disaster. The Web ecosystem is continuously spewing out new frameworks, new languages, new tooling, new package managers, new libraries, and new “model-view-foobar” paradigms. And none of them are really making a difference. This chaos prevents Web development from moving forward in any meaningful way. I don’t know what the solution is but I do know that yet another wrapper language over JavaScript is probably not the answer. Eventually Web development will become sane.

I contrast Web development with machine learning technologies where there are significant improvements and advances every few months.

Left: The awesome Lawn Darts game from the 1960s. They don’t make toys like they used to. Center: The F-106 Delta Dart interceptor, used from 1960 to 1988. Right: DART as an acronym has dozens of meanings, including “Danish Adult Reading Test” according to Wikipedia.