Thanks for speaking up Alex
Posted by Dion Almaer about a year ago on dart google
As committed and enthusiastic as I am about the prospects for JavaScript, others are just as enthused about Dart. Google is big, can do many things at once, and often isn’t of one mind. What we do agree on is that we’re trying to make things better the best we know how. Anyone who watches Google long enough should anticipate that we often have different ideas about what that means. For my part, then, consider me and my team to be committed JS partisans for as long as we think we can make a difference.
I am sure that a whole lot of groans went out when the leaked internal email got out there 10 months after the fact. Chances are there are emails that we all wouldn’t like to see out there, not for nefarious reasons necessarily, but more because they don’t tell the entire story.
There are people that I very much trust that are named in that thread.
I am glad to see Alex Russell speak out (he has never been shy in the past). It is a tough subject.
I have little doubt that the Dart team only thinks they will be pushing for a better world to live in. On the other hand, the ActiveX team probably thought the same. The issue is how things progress and who gets ownership. The Web is special in that it isn’t about a single vendor, so I hope that if Dart is successful (and again, we don’t even know what it is yet!) that it becomes part of an open commons.
It is also interesting to see people point to GWT and Closure and the like. I would argue that GWT is for very different developers than Closure. Google has some of the best “bare metal” Web developers out there. They need to optimize every byte and every call for many of their properties. Some of the applications are mammoth and still deal w/ old browsers. As a result, their constraints may not be yours. GWT may make sense for an Enterprise Java shop that hates JS, but I do not feel like it makes sense for Google Search (but the Google Groups guys think it is right for them…. which makes more sense when you learn they are Java folk).
Different strokes. Different folks.