Yeah I have no idea how someone who has used all these languages can come up with a conclusion like Dart is “uglier”. I really want to know what exactly they think is ugly about it!
Mostly its the core syntax, it's terribly noisy. Also parts of the implementation itself. While I cannot enumerate the taste, I can give you some examples.
For example:
- Class constructors cannot be in definition headers, i.e. class Something(Int a, Int b)
- The whole final and const/static const mess
- required is annoying and really "slapped on"
- shorthand syntax is => instead of =, personal pet peeve
- positional, named and optional parameters segregation makes things noisy
- concurrency, in which an event loop sounds like a great idea but ends up causing pain with multi-threading and background work so you have to spawn diff isolates
- the whole `await fn()` vs `fn()` validity issue, where you can miss the await keyword and it still compiles is such a slap in the face. think now they solved it, but you could also have returns from non-return functions and vice-versa.
- `dynamic` and generics in the same language have caused many bad designs
- extension types also feel hacked on
- type inference is annoying and highly contextual vs out of the box
- Worst sin: DateTime.now() returns different things based on the platform its running on, making it highly unreliable for something so important
I don’t want to sound harsh but that’s the least convincing list of language misfeatures I’ve ever seen. Almost every point is so minor I am surprised you didn’t mention having to type semicolons and similar incredibly inconsequential things.
I am biased - but mostly because I have actively used these in my career for quite a while now and encountered pains with both writing new code, upgrading old code and worst, inheriting code or helping debug someone else's code.
When given a choice, I'd rather use bland React Native nowadays than Expo or Flutter - one is a legacy addon to a framework, while the other sounds like a good idea until you step on a nail or have to read some _bad_ code. And there is a whoooole lot of bad flutter code out there due to relaxed language semantics.
