Google Teases Dart Programming Language

Buzz and speculation is building around a new and as-yet-unreleased programming language from Google called Dart. The new language, which is billed as "for structured Web programming," will be officially revealed in an opening keynote presentation at the software development conference GoTo in Aarhus, Denmark, on October 10.

The two presenters slated to make the announcement are no small potatoes in the programming world—Lars Bak (right), best known for his work on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine (in layman's terms, V8 is what makes the Chrome browser fast), and Gilad Bracha (left), who created the programming languageNewspeak and is the primary author of the Java Language Specification (JLS), 3rd Edition. Both men are currently employed as engineers at Google, although they have also both spent considerable time at Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle in January 2010).

Not much at all is known about Dart, and mum's the word from Bracha, who posted to his Google+ and Twitter streams "all will be clear" next month after the keynote. But some intelligent guesswork(notably by sister site ExtremeTech's Sebastian Anthony) is pointing to the likelihood that Dart will be more like Java (an object-oriented language) than, say, C. Additionally, because Google already has one programming language, called Go, which is similar to C in some ways, it's likely that Dart will not try to cover the same ground. Plus, Bracha and Bak's backgrounds point more toward object-oriented languages than anything systems-related.

Another interesting point worth noting is that both Java and JavaScript made the top ten list of the most popular programming languages in the world this month. TIOBE, a company that tracks and assesses the quality of software, publishes a list of the top 20 programming languages each month. The top ten for September 2011 were:1) Java, 2) C, 3), C++, 4) C#, 5) PHP, 6) Objective-C, 7) (Visual) Basic, 8) Python, 9) Perl, and 10) JavaScript.