I've been writing "writing simulation engines and 3D rendering engines since around when you were born" and I love JavaScript.
Like most C/C++/ASM programmers I hated it at first and I'm under no delusion that it's going to replace C/C++/ASM any time soon. But like many say, "the right tool for the job". By any measure Lua is complete shit and yet Carmack made it popular by using as the glue for most of his games.
JavaScript does many things extremely elegantly and the environment it runs in is fun, cross platform and accessible. It's fun to make things in JavaScript the same way it was fun to make programs on my Atari 800, Commodore 64. You type something and click "refresh" and it's up. No downloading a 2-4gig dev environment. No finding 4 SDKs you need to install. No figuring out how to get your image libraries to link. No worrying about how to get the initial screen up,
And even better, when it works you just send you friends a link. No installing. No worries if they are on OSX and you are on Windows or Linux.
Are you going to write Shadow of the Colossus in JavaScript? Probably not. But ICO? Yea, no problem. Any Zelda to date? Sure. 80-90% of all games ever shipped would run just fine in JavaScript at this point in time. Very few games actually need every once of perf.
> And unsecured access to the graphics stack is a terrible idea.
WebGL does not provide unsecured access to the graphics stack so I'm not sure what this BS remark was about.
> "By any measure Lua is complete shit and yet Carmack made it popular by using as the glue for most of his games."
This just isn't the case. In recent games iD software has moved away from using scripting languages at all. Later in the same talk, Carmack praises iOS for reversing the trend against Java and bringing back native languages. Saying that native languages are the only way you can get predictable performance for things like smooth scrolling.
Like most C/C++/ASM programmers I hated it at first and I'm under no delusion that it's going to replace C/C++/ASM any time soon. But like many say, "the right tool for the job". By any measure Lua is complete shit and yet Carmack made it popular by using as the glue for most of his games.
JavaScript does many things extremely elegantly and the environment it runs in is fun, cross platform and accessible. It's fun to make things in JavaScript the same way it was fun to make programs on my Atari 800, Commodore 64. You type something and click "refresh" and it's up. No downloading a 2-4gig dev environment. No finding 4 SDKs you need to install. No figuring out how to get your image libraries to link. No worrying about how to get the initial screen up,
And even better, when it works you just send you friends a link. No installing. No worries if they are on OSX and you are on Windows or Linux.
Are you going to write Shadow of the Colossus in JavaScript? Probably not. But ICO? Yea, no problem. Any Zelda to date? Sure. 80-90% of all games ever shipped would run just fine in JavaScript at this point in time. Very few games actually need every once of perf.
> And unsecured access to the graphics stack is a terrible idea.
WebGL does not provide unsecured access to the graphics stack so I'm not sure what this BS remark was about.