Disinvestment into Python, Flutter, and Dart is a clear signal that those tools are unimportant to Google. I won't be recommending that anyone use Dart or Flutter on new projects.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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You shouldn't have ever been recommending dart or flutter.
Python ain't going anywhere tho
You shouldn’t have ever been recommending dart or flutter.
Why not?
I would argue so, because Google has quite a reputation for killing projects: https://killedbygoogle.com
Especially with a programming language or framework, you don't want to invest in it, only to find out that it's going on the chopping block.
Even if Google laid off staff for the Flutter and Dart team, I don't think those two will be going anywhere any time soon. Mostly because a huge majority Android ecosystem is based on them, still a stupid decisions of them.
I hope this doesn't age like milk.
I'm mostly just biased because I do native mobile development but flutter has always seemed like a false economy to me. You're trying to build cross platform but it'll take more than 2x as long as building each platform to get the same quality of experience. So either you have a shittier experience or you take even longer than true native dev.
But I'm obviously very biased here.
I've used it before and it's got it's pros and cons. Ultimately the big thing is not all apps need to be the "killer app". Some apps are pretty simple, so a one size fits all can be nice. It's definitely not the same as developing natively, but for small teams/apps it's not too bad.
If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.
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Has anyone used Dart the past decade?
Aside from everyone who's using flutter?
That’s a terrible language IMO
Just had to look at it out of curiosity and man, it looks like yet another C+=1. The code samples on Wikipedia contain one of those gaudy for-loops and a ternary, as if that was still peak language design four decades after C got published.
But what I seriously don't get: Why the hell did they develop Go then? That's yet another C+=1, with even some design similarities to Dart, e.g. it's garbage-collected but compiles to machine code.
Like, yeah, it wouldn't be the first time that different teams develop competing products at Google, but what kind of culture leads to there even being demand for two C+=1s?
I can’t get enough of JSX (React) markup syntax personally, it’s just too simple and efficient that I don’t want to learn anything else ;)
To be fair, Go is very different from Dart and if they look like C it’s because they try to give you the abstraction with the memory safety which is pretty great.
But yeah Google is kinda the developer of useless languages. Even if Go is a banger of a technology
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Dart has all the modern bell and whistles and bullshit syntax too, the Wikipedia samples hardly do it justice
It was originally meant as a better JavaScript and it was. It failed when none of the other browsers expressed interest in supporting it. It languished for a while and then was taken up by the Flutter team. At the time Flutter took it up it was somewhere around the level of Java 8 in features but not quite on par. Since then it’s seen some massive improvements to the type system and language. It’s completely null sound, not just null safe like Kotlin. It recently got records/tuples and one of the more capable pattern matching syntaxes I’ve ever seen in a functional imperative hybrid language. The next stable version of dart will introduce a compiler macro system that is very promising. The syntax isn’t always the prettiest due to it trying to not totally break old code. I do think that it offers a wide range of modern language features that competes heavily with Swift and Kotlin in the mobile space.
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I sorta forgot it existed.
I won't be recommending that anyone use Dart or Flutter on new projects.
You seem to think Google cares at all. Android has been languishing and Flutter is lightyears ahead. KMP is junk compared to what Flutter has accomplished with a fraction of the bells and whistles.
You seem to think Google cares at all.
Odd conclusion to draw. I'm simply not inclined to recommend tools that are not going to be supported by the organization that created them. Development ecosystems are important when planning a project.
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I spent thr last 10 minutes reading the flutter docs, and I have no fucking idea what it is, what language it is written in, or generally anything useful about it. I think we'll be fine.
Also, Google's contributions to Python are mostly obsolete. optparse was replaced by argparse which is .mostly replaced by click. Yapf was never successful and black has taken a commanding lead. Python will be just fine.
If you couldn't figure out what flutter is in 10 minutes that reflects poorly on you much more than anything else.
Flutter is a UX/UI framework for Dart programming language. Dart is a statically typed (optionally dynamic possible), completely type safe, soundly null-safe compiled programming language. It can compile to JS to run on the web, or compile to x86_64 or Arm assembly to run on hardware.
Combining Dart, which is honestly an awesome but underrated language with Flutter which is a declarative UI framework, I have found a new love for app development. It's very pleasant.
And now I get shot in the dick with this news....
Flutter uses dart. It's one of the best ui building frameworks I have used. Not that it is perfect...
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“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers”
There was this incredible management consultant in france in the 18th century. Name eludes me, but if he was still around Google could hire him and start finding some far more convincing efficiencies.
The guy was especially good at aligning resources to remove layers
Robespierre?
You could make a religion out of this.
No don't
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I am a manager at a big tech and I hate capitalism. CXOs really only care about profits, and thus everybody high-level proposes new enshittification strategies.
Can't really make heads of tails of this. I thought they were really into AI and Python is a big part of that. Which other languages are they going to invest in? Rust for Chromium?
Python is in essence the interface for AI tools that are optimized with languages that are easier to get high performance results with.
They hired cheaper talent from elsewhere for python.
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What idiot applies for a job at Google?
Someone who wants to have Google on their CV when they leave in 2 years. Generally works out.
Looks like my Lemmy-client of choice did some retrying when I had poor connection, sorry about that.
I think trying to go cheap on native apps was always kind of a fool's errand, tbh. Cordova, Xamarin, React Native and so on - all pretty sub-par solutions leading to poor experience without actually materializing the desired savings.
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