The Dart Programming Language

Foreword

In the early spring of 2006, I wrote a short blog post called “Gilad is Right” where, as a recovering typaholic, I admitted that Gilad’s idea of optional and layered type systems, where static types cannot change the runtime behavior of the program and do not prevent an otherwise legal program from compiling or executing, was a necessary design trade-off for programming languages aimed at millions of developers. At that time I was working on Visual Basic, which already supported a form of optional typing by means of the Option Strict Off statement, but that feature was under heavy fire from static typing proponents. Type systems are often highly non-linear and after a certain point their complexity explodes while adding very little value ...