Early Nov 11 Update

Another small update....

It has been a bit of a strange few weeks as much of my time has been consumed by family stuff. So my coding time has been fairly limited. I have also been jumping around a fair bit on topics.

I have taught myself a little bit of OpenGL, The modern type, I used to know some way back when using GLBegin and GLEnd were all the rage. I am happy that it all turns out to be quite simple. Not being scared of matrices and vectors probably helps this.

Days Until has had another little iteration. Nothing spectacular and I have squashed the final bug that was holding up a release. So that should be posted soon.

Finally I having been taking a look at Dart. The new language from google. I quite like it even though it is in a very early state. I only took a look when they released the first iteration of an IDE for it.

I don't understand why they have a stand alone IDE rather than a plugin for eclipse. It is obviously based on eclipse. Perhaps there is a plan for the IDE that involves doing stuff that you cannot do as a plug in. That is perhaps they need to alter the core in some way. I am not to worried about it either way. Being in an Alpha state it does not contain much in the way of features.

So how have I found Dart? As I said before I kind of like it. I think this is because if you know Java you kind of already now most of the language. Well except for lambda functions that Dart has which is a definite plus point. There are probably other features I could think off that would be cool to add but then that would add complexity to the language, at the moment it is quite simple.

A lot has been said about Dart's type system most not nice. I have used enough different languages to not really be concerned either way. I perfer to have types if possible but can see why people prefer to not have them. I suspect once the tooling for the language get there it could be a nice solution.

I have not looked at performance or deployment but I imagine both will be OK once they get a few iterations into the life of Dart.

I guess so far Dart gets a B+ in terms of my feeling about it. I like it but it's not yet amazing. I get the feeling it has the potential to be quite a productive language.  Time will tell I guess.