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Go has been a minimalist language from inception. It's not "let's try to make the best language, period", it's "let's explore what benefits we can gain from sticking to a limited subset of language designs that hasn't been seriously tried in decades".

Dart might be a bit of a kitchen sink language (what's it with Danes and operator overloading?), but you couldn't port over the minimalism of Go by addition, it would not be minimalism anymore.

Dart innovations like "collection if/for" syntax seem laughably trivial, but when you look at the examples for declarative UI it should become immediately clear that they reduce cognitive load a lot compared to the equivalent flatMaps or imperative state buildup. Those syntax goodies seem really nice in the scope Dart is made for, but I think that they would look seriously out of place in a more general purpose language.




> "collection if/for"

I knew exactly how handy that was the first time I saw it.


Even after having publicly sung its praise a part of me still considers that feature outrageously bad taste. There could be a nicely orthogonal language feature instead, with universal applicability for good knows what, instead of this highly pragmatic superficial syntax hack! I think it's the part of me that loves Scala. (I do, but I'm also installing Flutter SDK while writing these lines)


Maybe it’s a syntax hack. But, man, sometimes you just need to get a thing done and... it works. When you see it, it makes sense and if it makes sense and works... I don’t really care how “pure” it is.




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