A few days after Google was caught registering a bunch of Dart-related domain names, and the inevitable storm of speculation, it has now emerged that Dart is a new programming language for “structured web programming.”

On October 10, during the keynote speech of the Goto conference in Aarhus, Denmark, two Google developers will unveil the new language. We can only infer Dart’s characteristics and feature set until then, but fortunately the Goto conference website gives us some very detailed biographies about the Googlers who are delivering the keynote, and who are presumably the language’s creators. Gilad Bracha, a veteran of SAP, Sun, and the co-author of Java is one of the speakers — and Lars Bak, the creator of Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, is the other.

Now, Google has already released one language in recent history — Go — so we can assume that Dart won’t be a C-like system-oriented language. With the “structured web programming” moniker, it’s also likely to be some kind of interpreted, in-the-browser language — so more like JavaScript or Python, and less like Java or other compiled languages. One of the biggest hints, though, is that both Bracha and Bak have worked extensively with Smalltalk in the past — and an interpreted Smalltalkesque language would fit right into the “structured web programming” mold, too.

The problem with a new web-oriented programming language, though, is that there are already a ton of viable and well-supported languages out there. Dart, if it is indeed an interpreted Smalltalk, would compete almost directly with JavaScript and Python, the latter of which is one of Google’s most popular languages. If use Go as a yardstick, though, Dart will probably be more of a curio than a groundbreaker — a language that is designed to explicitly solve Googlecentric issues, rather than an endemic programming language issue — and who knows, outsiders might find a use for the language, too.

Update October 10: Google has now unveiled a few more details about Dart

[Image credit: Bogdan Suditu]