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Comment by neckro23 | Hacker News Reader

    var drawing = document.createElement('canvas');
    document.body.appendChild(drawing);
    var ctx = drawing.getContext('2d');
    ctx.beginPath();
    ctx.moveTo(0, 0);
    ctx.lineTo(100, 100);
    ctx.stroke();

There's a bit of ceremony in setting up the canvas, but yes, it's simple.

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1) Ok, in firefox I opened the console window. 29 buttons. The one to type this in was the thing at the very bottom that looked like ">> " with no cursor in it indicating that you could type in it.

2) typing your code (on this page) ... nothing happens. Element was added at the bottom of a very large page, element was not visible, so I didn't see anything happen.

3) the added element is a white box on a white background. Grand total indication of it getting added was a small adjustment in the (hidden by default) scrollbar on the right of the page ...

4) after that you want to start people out with paths and stroking and state storing and evaluating ?

Making a program like this that responds to keyboard input at all in javascript is dozens of lines, and you have to know DOM, properties, and event handlers in addition to the base language to make anything happen. Getting keyboard handling good enough to have a simple game ... let's not go there. Hundreds of lines. And of course, doesn't work on your friends machine (different browser ...).

I hope you can see that this is less than optimal to get people exited.

I am one of those guys that thinks web programming sucks, that it's far inferior for most programs as compared to Qt/QML and even to Delphi/VB like languages.

Your little typo is almost Freudian. Yes it's optimal for getting people to exit. But you're right, not so much for getting them excited.

qbasic:

    SCREEN 13
    LINE (X1, Y1) - (X2, Y2), COLOUR