> Well, we're not yet to the point that barrier between systems and web programming languages to be eliminated.
We are one or two iterations away. Look at this thread. A lot of people were expecting something looking closer to Go. Go itself is an example: statically typed, garbage collected "systems" language. If you ignore the differences in the type system and the slice syntactic sugar, that sounds conspicuously close to Java. And Dart itself sounds closer to Java than Javascript as well. Not that I believe we'll converge on Java, given the glacial pace of evolution in that community.
But the edges of the state-of-the-art are getting closer in this generation. Next generation (5-10 years from now) will be even closer, if not identical.
On a technical note: what exactly do you have in mind when making a distinction between "web" and "systems"? Backends qualify as "systems" in my book and I'd be a fool if I'd want to develop in two distinct languages when there is just one app. Thanks to GWT and now Dart, I don't have to.
Well, by "web programming" in the context of the original comment, I was talking mostly about web backends. If you mean that, then yeah, we'd develop those in one language, in fact we already do in some case (node.js et al).
But I don't qualify that as "systems programming", to quote Wikipedia:
"System programming (or systems programming) is the activity of programming system software".
and:
"System software is computer software designed to operate the computer hardware and to provide a platform for running application software".
We are one or two iterations away. Look at this thread. A lot of people were expecting something looking closer to Go. Go itself is an example: statically typed, garbage collected "systems" language. If you ignore the differences in the type system and the slice syntactic sugar, that sounds conspicuously close to Java. And Dart itself sounds closer to Java than Javascript as well. Not that I believe we'll converge on Java, given the glacial pace of evolution in that community.
But the edges of the state-of-the-art are getting closer in this generation. Next generation (5-10 years from now) will be even closer, if not identical.
On a technical note: what exactly do you have in mind when making a distinction between "web" and "systems"? Backends qualify as "systems" in my book and I'd be a fool if I'd want to develop in two distinct languages when there is just one app. Thanks to GWT and now Dart, I don't have to.