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9rx 5 days ago

> The only reason it didn't end on pile of obscure languages nobody uses, it called Google

Dart ended up on the pile of languages nobody uses. And Carbon? What's Carbon? Exactly!

> Case in point, Limbo and Oberon-2, the languages that influenced its design

Agreed. Limbo and Oberon-2, as primitive as they may look now, had the kitchen sinks of their time. Why wouldn't they have ended up on the pile of languages nobody uses?

pjmlp 5 days ago | parent [-]

People love to bring those as counter examples, without actually knowing a single fact about them.

Dart was a victim of internal politics between the Chrome team, Dart team, AdWords moving away from GWT wanting AngularDart (see Angular documentary), and the Web in general.

Had Chrome team kept pushing DartVM, it might have been quite different story.

Carbon, good example of failure to actually know what the team purposes are. It is officially a research project for Google themselves, where the team is the first to advise using Rust or another MSL.

One just needs to actually spend like a couple of minutes on their wiki, but I guess that is asking too much on modern times.

Limbo and Oberon-2 were definitely not kitchen sinks of their time, their failure was that neither Bell Labs in 1996, nor ETHZ in 1992, were that relevant for the programming language community in the industry.

9rx 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Had Chrome team kept pushing DartVM, it might have been quite different story.

Trouble with that line of thinking is that Google never pushed Go either. It didn't even bother to use it internally (outside from the occasional side project here and there). Google paid some salaries. I'll give you that. But it has paid salaries for a lot of different languages. That is not some kind of secret sauce.

> It is officially a research project for Google themselves

It's not just a research project. It is officially "not ready for use", but its roadmap has a clear "ready for use" plan in the coming months. Rust was also "not ready for use" when it hit the streets, it officially being a Mozilla research project, but every second discussion on HN was about it and what is to come. And that was without Google backing. If what you say is true, why isn't Carbon being shouted from every rooftop right now?

I know you're struggling to grasp at straws here, but let's just be honest for a moment: If it hasn't caught attention already, it isn't going to. Just another language to add to the pile.

pjmlp 5 days ago | parent [-]

I guess Kubernetes doesn't count as Google pushing it then.

It is officially "not ready to use", it isn't a strawman as people keep complaining about nothing.

9rx 4 days ago | parent [-]

Kubernetes is written in Go (-ish. More like written in Java using Go syntax, especially in its early days when you claim it did some kind of pushing). But what kind of push are you dreaming up that it offered? If anything, Kubernetes leaves you to question if you ever want to write software again. The idea that it made anyone, let alone legions of people required to make something a "success", think "This is great. I should write my program in Go too!" is laughable.