Foreword

When I heard that we were starting work on Dart, a structured and scalable language with a fast virtual machine, a powerful editor, and a compiler to JavaScript, at first I didn’t believe it. “Could this be the project to make web programming easier for developers like me?” I hopefully wondered. Coming from a structured language background, and used to powerful developer tools, I’d been waiting for a more productive way to build larger modern web apps. The Dart project sounded like just what I was looking for. I grew up on object-oriented languages like C++, Java, and Ruby as I first built interactive websites and then later rich client-side web apps. I learned to be productive with classes, objects, and modular code. I appreciated IDEs for their analysis, refactoring, and navigation capabilities because they helped me write more complex, larger applications. Life was great. Looking for a new opportunity, I was lucky enough to get a job working with the Chrome team. For the first time, I learned how to exploit the modern browser, and I dove into the many HTML5 features. The modern web evolves very quickly and reaches so many people that it’s an exciting place to be. Life was even better.

Although I loved the iterative and fast-paced nature of web development, I was missing my structured languages and helpful tools. I wanted a way to build for modern browsers with IDEs that could perform code completion, languages that had real classes, and more.