Say Google unveiled a Scala, Haskell or even Go like language.
Sure, the hip crowd would be pleased. But would it ever gain traction with the web dev masses?
Hell, those languages have not that much traction even outside web development.
Now, if Google had unveiled something like Ruby or Python, that would have also pleased the HN crowd (maybe a little less that some extravagant functional language with crazy type tricks). And it could possible gain traction too. But that too would hardly be revolutionary.
Scala is gaining a lot of acceptance even without the backing of a major sponsor like Google. I daresay that if Google were behind Scala, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
One also has to remember that Google itself intends to use this language a lot, so it's much more likely that they approximate something they already use. And they're doing a lot of Java, where Dart doesn't seem too exotic. In some other thread, Dart was compared to GWT, and I think that's getting pretty close. For teams that would've used Java/GWT before, doing it in Dart instead isn't a huge jump. Probably not even as huge as Scala, where at least you'd be able to remain within the secure embrace of the JVM.
(Not a huge jump for Android programmers, either. In light of the Oracle lawsuit avalanche, this might be interesting…)
Say Google unveiled a Scala, Haskell or even Go like language.
Sure, the hip crowd would be pleased. But would it ever gain traction with the web dev masses?
Hell, those languages have not that much traction even outside web development.
Now, if Google had unveiled something like Ruby or Python, that would have also pleased the HN crowd (maybe a little less that some extravagant functional language with crazy type tricks). And it could possible gain traction too. But that too would hardly be revolutionary.