Randal Schwartz

How am I going to use this practically? None of my current clients are demanding that.

Well, I download and compile Perl 6 every day. And every time I go to YAPC or some other place where they're talking about Perl 6, I get excited about it, for all of a month, and then I come back and then I go,

Clearly if I were to write training materials for that, I'd have to present it at least to 200 people, whether that's 10 classes of 20, or a giant 200 person week-end event, that's sort of the minimum for amortizing the inception cost for any class that I've ever written. So I use the 200 number as kind of a rule of thumb.

And I just don't see that happening, I don't see getting enough people together in the right places, to be able to do that. So I continue to watch what people are doing with Perl 6, I continue compiling it every day, and I'd love for it to become extremely popular so I could go back to that, and say I could continue my Perl heritage.

But, as I mentioned earlier, I think Dart has legs. Given that Google's behind it, given that Google and a number of other companies are already deploying public-facing projects in it. Given that it does compile down and work in all modern browsers, I easily see the need for like rent a hotel room for a weekend and have 20, 50, 100 people show up to learn about it, because single-page applications are all the rage right now, and Dart is a really solid language for that, and Google is betting on that.

You may say, Where is Go in that equation? Go is great for server-side stuff, and great for the kind of things they're doing on back-ends, and although Dart can also do back-end stuff, essentially replacing Node.JS for that sort of thing, and have a single language for both back-end and front-end. Dart's real win is in the front-end, being able to be transpiled over to JavaScript and being able to scale to hundreds of thousands of lines of code for some of their larger applications. I think that's got legs, I'm in on the groundfloor, like I was on Perl, I'm already recognized among the Dart people as being someone who can put things together. I did a one-hour long intro to Dart talk that was reviewed by some of the key people in the Dart community, and they really like what I did with it, so I seem to have, again, that knack for finding something complex and finding the simplest ends of it, and I'm already there with Dart.

And also, the whole Fuchsia announcement a few weeks ago, where Google's coming out with this language for real-time operating systems, and it has a strong Dart component in it. I think that's another thing that says, say if they start putting that in Google Glass, or if they even put that as a replacement for the Android operating system, or for Google Chrome, which some people are suspecting that this is all amalgamation of it.

Especially when somebody's looking at the source code the other day, and it has a lot of files, not only from Android, but also from the old Be OS, which was sort of the predecessor of what eventually became OS X, kind of interesting that that's part of that project as well.

So with Fuchsia on the horizon, with Dart already being deployed by numbers of people, with me having a knack for understanding how Dart actually works, given that it was also built by some of the key players in Smalltalk, which I go back 16 years with, I think this is probably the right place for me to look at my future.