This talk takes a look at a number of steps taken in recent years in the evolution of the Dart programming language, including null safety, local variable promotion and flow analysis, extension types, and more. Special emphasis is given to the pragmatic nature of many elements of these features, as opposed to the more ideal approach which is available to programming language designers who do not have an existing installed base of code, and a community of developers who do not want to change all of it just for fun. For example, the migration of null safety involved an additional kind of type that only existed during the transition period.