Slides from Dart talk at O'Reilly's FluentConf JavaScript conference

The fine folks at FluentConf included a Dart session in their first JavaScript conference. I had the pleasure of presenting "Structured web programming with Dart", an introduction to Dart's motivations, language, libraries, tools, and ecosystem. The room was packed, which was quite encouraging!

I learned that Dart's optional static type annotations are very interesting to JavaScript developers. They especially appreciated the optional part. That is, in Dart you can experiment with simple functions and scripts as you start your idea, and grow over time to full complex modern web apps that use more structure like classes, interfaces, and libraries. Once your design emerges and you are comfortable with the structure, or once you enter maintenance mode, you can add the type annotations. Once those type annotations are in your code, the magic turns on.

Type annotations provide inline documentation for your fellow developers. The toolchain can also read the type annotations and give you early warnings, refactoring support, and runtime type assertion errors.

Dart's types are there when you need them, but don't get in your way with too much ceremony or burden. This message was well received at the conference, based on the feedback that I got. Good stuff!

You can check out the slides from my Dart talk at FluentConf or views all the Dart presentations and slides on dartlang.org. Enjoy!

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