Dart: Google's New Programming Language is Coming Next Month

Next month, at the Goto software development conference in Aarhus Denmark, Google is scheduled to reveal Dart, its new programming language for “structured web programming.” Just a few days ago, Google registered a number of Dart-related domain names, so it was already clear that the company had something in the works for this. The announcement of a Dart-focused keynote at Goto marks the first public announcement of this new language.

“Structured Web Programming”

Obviously, we don’t know a lot about Dart yet. Given that Google already launched another language – Go – that is very C-like, we can safely assume that Dart will be something different. We can get some clues from the biographies of the keynote presenters: the two people who are giving the keynote are Gilad Bracha, who worked on Smalltalk in the middle of the 1990s and then on the specs and implementation of Java at Sun, and Lars Bak, who works on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine today, but also worked on Smalltalk and Java.

As ExtremeTech’s Sebastian Anthony rightly notes, given the two presenters’ background and the idea that this will be a language for “structured web programming,” chances are that the two will present a “Smalltalkesque” in-browser language similar to JavaScript or Python.

So far, Google’s attempt at launching new programming languages hasn’t been met with a huge success. Go, while stirring some interesting among some programmers, has remained a niche product and Dart – if it is indeed the kind of language I expect it to be – will go up against incumbents that are supported by massive ecosystems already. The same, however, could have been said about those languages when they first appeared, so it will definitely be worth keeping an eye on this next month.

Image credit: Jake Sutton