Opinionated programming language choice in 2020

Warning: many opinions ahead, please be prepared.

The ring of competition: surfaces, services, and AI

We will compare languages by their performance and adoption on:

1. Surfaces: UI related clients. For example, web frontend, mobile apps, desktop apps, etc.
2. Services: headless clients. For example, backend server, CLI, etc.
3. AI: this can fall into either of the first two categories, but since it’s a fairly hot recently (and likely to continue), I will list it as its own category.

Dart is challenging all the UI related area

Although Dart is a new contender to the UI competition, it’s getting a lot of hype thanks to its intuitive async programming features and isolate-based concurrency (in human language, it means its code is more readable/maintainable and performs better).

1. Dart vs. Kotlin: Kotlin is a Java redesign that resolves async usability and async coding but at its core, it’s still Java-ish. On the other hand, Dart is designed from the ground up to support async UI update and isolate-based concurrency, so in this case, Dart is definitely a winner.
2. Dart vs. Swift…