You're right, they are of course different. What I meant is that if you know any of those languages, your knowledge can be very easily mapped to Dart. I had experience with those langs before, and I was productive with Dart from day 1, it never felt like a problem to me. I'm just happy Google didn't go down the route of using JS like in RN :P

It's a good language though, and if you have experience with C#/Swift/Kotlin/Java etc...you'll be productive from day 1...there's not really much to learn, I wouldn't call it a problem.

My concern about Dart wouldn't so much be language quality, it would be the ecosystem. I know if I go out there and do a project in JavaScript or C# (so RN/Xamarin) there's piles of libraries out there. There's documentation. There's Stack Overflow answers and tutorials.

Did you just say that Dart is a good language? You're aware of the memes about Dart's type system being completely broken by design right?

https://www.dartlang.org/faq#q-why-are-generics-covariant

Of course this is from the company that brought us interface{} and people seem to be OK with that...

Flaws in the type system just aren't that important to most people. Consider the popularity of Typescript, which is unsound.

I gather that you would prefer invariant generics. I know a bit about type systems but very little about subtyping so I would really enjoy some information :)

Why are covariant generics bad? (also just a link is fine)

Invariant generics would at least let you rely on the type system doing its job correctly. But even better would be to annotate each type parameter as covariant, contravariant, or invariant - this is what Scala and C# and probably a bunch of other languages do.

As an example, here's approximately how the Function trait is defined in Scala. The square brackets indicate type parameters (like angle brackets in Java), the - indicates covariance, and the + indicates contravariance.

  trait Function1[-T, +R] {
      def apply(arg1: T): R
  }

In my case, it's not at all for the network effect, since these days they have too much content and anyway favor "premium" posts in terms of visibility...so for me it's more about the following:

* I don't need to create my own blog. I know, it takes a 5 minutes, have done it many many times before...just to kill it some time after because seeing it so empty was too sad. With Medium you publish whenever you want, and because it's not really "your blog", it doesn't feel as sad if you don't publish anything for months and months.

* it's super simple to paste images, code snippets and videos. I can just focus on writing and I know it will "look good" in the end. Sounds stupid, but it's true.

* I don't have to worry about spam comments, t&c, privacy policy (if I want to have analytics, which Medium has) etc...it's all on them

So yes, for a non-prolific writer, I think it works well. It's a pity they no longer allow custom domains though (which they had in the past), and at times it's toooo limited (eg: no nested bulleted/numbered lists...which I usually used a lot), but still good enough.

I'd probably switch to my own blog if were to publish stuff regularly and wanted to have my own "brand"/style/design.

Funny...one of the reasons I like it (and prefer it over RN) is that it doesn't use JS :)

big YES! RN has that too, and it was one of its main benefits for me...for the rest, the experience with RN is not as friendly as it is with Flutter...