Comment by SimHacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SimHacker | Hacker News Reader

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I asked you if you had an axe to grind against JavaScript or the browser, an if so, what better alternative can you suggest? And I asked you some other questions, too. Care to answer them?

Stating that my testicles are twisted and implying that I'm going to shoot up an elementary school isn't a effective way to dodge my questions, it's just childish trolling.

Get back to the point: What's wrong with rewriting a game in JavaScript so it runs in the browser, if the goal is to make it accessible to as many people as possible? What's so "curious" about targeting the browser, and what criticism do have of rewriting code in JavaScript so it runs in the browser?

Would you prefer using a cross-compiler to translate the existing C++ code into JavaScript? That would make it much harder for people to read and understand, you know, which is 180 degrees in the opposite direction than I want to take it.

Can you suggest any better alternatives, or can you better explain what you really meant by what you said, please? Because you're not making much sense to me, and you're getting very emotional about it.

You asked me a bunch of questions that I don't for one second believe were not rhetorical and based on some assumptions that you've pretty obviously (and incorrectly) made about me, what I said, and what I meant. So no, I don't really care to answer them, for the same reason that I won't request that you propose an alternative to C++.

And by the way, please learn to separate swearing, sarcasm, or whatever it is that you seem to associate with emotion, from emotion. They're rhetorical devices. Oddly enough, you seem to be the one getting emotional here. Or perhaps you consider your spontaneously-hostile defense of JavaScript to have been the rational course of action?

I asked you to clarify an apparent circular argument you had made (I wrote it in JavaScript, because I targeted the browser, because I wrote it in JavaScript...), expressed that the browser seemed to me an unnatural platform for a game (but not necessarily a poor one), you shot back a smart-ass remark about how lots of people use browsers (no shit), and here we are, arguing about how much I (apparently) hate JavaScript.

I think I'm done here. Judging by your perception of me, you seem to be arguing with someone else anyway, so I'll go ahead and leave you to it.

What you've failed to explain is what's so "unnatural" about the browser as a platform for a game. I think you're wrong about that, and it should be pretty obvious why I want it to run in the browser and why I rewrote it in JavaScript. It seems like you're just pretending to be dense. So what exactly do you mean by "unnatural"?

It's not a circular argument, because JavaScript is not the only reason to use a browser, and browsers are not the only reason to use JavaScript. There are so many other good arguments for writing a game in JavaScript and for using web browsers as a platform. For example, the ubiquity of the platform, the available of so many libraries for rendering graphics and implementing user interfaces (as I mentioned above, somebody's already written a WebGL library for rendering digital Lego bricks, for example), and so on.

I've already proposed (and implemented) JavaScript as an alternative to C++, just as I earlier proposed (and implemented) C++ as an alternative to C. I've ported SimCity to numerous platforms, rewritten it in C++, and written user interfaces for it in PostScript/NeWS, TCL/Tk/X11, Python/GTK and OpenLaszlo/Flash. So I have a good idea of its requirements, and I think JavaScript in a web browser is an ideal language and platform for it at this point in history. Do you disagree with any of that, and can you suggest anything more "natural"? If not, then keep quiet, and we're done here.

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