Google, JavaScript, and Dart
A leaked Google memo, The Future of JavaScript, from November 2010 is being circulated around the Internet, outlining Google’s supposed technical strategy for Web programming languages. Google plans to improve JavaScript, while also creating a competitor to JavaScript, Dart (ex-Dash), that it hopes will be the new lingua franca of the Web.
Apple and Microsoft already control the primary languages for their platforms.
Update (2011-09-16): JavaScript creator Brendan Eich:
A Dart to JS compiler will never be “decent” compared to having the Dart VM in the browser. Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM.
So “Works best in Chrome” and even “Works only in Chrome” are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. We see more of this fragmentation every day. As a user of Chrome and Firefox (and Safari), I find it painful to experience, never mind the political bad taste.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
"Apple and Microsoft already control the primary languages for their platforms."
HTML is Google's platform...
"Their apps are written in JavaScript."
I very much take your initial point about the fundamental difference between Apple/Microsoft on one hand, and Google on the other hand.
I'm just sayin' that Google apps thus work on all platforms, which is their upside in exchange for the downside of not controlling the primary language of their platform.
It's deja vu all over again from 1996. Try to get the most control possible over the lingua franca of the Web, and thus win the game. And Google's in a better position to do that than anyone else, no?
But, hell, I do my websurfing with JS-disabled, so what do I know, other than that this is an interesting topic...
