When you're so used to one language and you're trying to learn a new one, its likely that you'll find yourself always looking back to what you already know to find out if the new language matches up. I know I do. If I find similarities, I'm happy 🙂. If I find more features, I'm excited 😄. If the new language is lacking, I'm like, how come something so important (however trivial the thing may be) is missing 🤨 I can't work with this.

Say I needed to turn a string into a number with Javascript, there's a number of ways I could do it:

• using parseInt()
• using parseFloat()
• using Number()

Dart has almost similar functions to achieve the same results.

Turning a string into a number (or vice versa) with Dart

You can try out the code snippets on dartpad

String to int

// String -> int
main () {
    var one = int.parse('1');
    print(one == 1); // prints true
}

String to double

// String -> double
main () {
    var onePointOne = double.parse('1.1');
    print(onePointOne == 1.1); // prints true
}

int to String

// int -> String
main () {
    String oneAsString = 1.toString();
    print(oneAsString == '1'); // prints true
}

double to String

// double -> String
main () {
    String piAsString = 3.14159.toStringAsFixed(2);
    print(piAsString == '3.14'); // prints true
}

I've been wanting to take up mobile app development with flutter so I thought I'd get comfortable with dart first before diving into flutter. So far, I'm happy. Coming from Javascript, Dart is easy to pick up, and fun to learn.