munificent / blog.md Secret
In this post I'm going to talk about a handful of language changes we're working on in Dart right now to make collection literals more powerful. By "collection literals", I mean the built-in syntax for creating lists, maps, and sets:
If you aren't writing Dart code today, this may not be super relevant to you and your Life Goals, but I hope I can entice you to keep reading anyway. I think the features are interesting in their own right, and the execution model that underlies them might stretch your brain in useful and/or engaging ways. I always think it's fun to learn about new language stuff, even in languages I don't currently use.
If you heard anything about Dart in the past year, it was probably in the context of Flutter. If you haven't heard of it, Flutter is a UI framework for building multi-platform mobile apps. I can't do it justice here, but click the link and it will answer every question in your heart. (Well, at least every question regarding what Flutter is. It probably won't tell you why that high school crush never called you back.)
A key choice any UI framework needs to make is how the basic visual UI elements —buttons, colors, text, layout, etc.—are created. Do you author these in some sort of separate "template" or "markup" format or right in executable code where the UI's behavior is defined? Every fifteen years or so, the industry flips on which answer is the right one.
