Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

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Programming in the early 90s felt like the Wild-West - anyone could strike gold, anyone could make pickaxes, and anyone could build a town around a set of rail-tracks. Almost all of the large game companies today started as small programming teams in the 90s. I don't know what could be more exciting for startup.

The fact that feature-rich tools, IDEs and libraries don't exist for JS/Canvas games is EXACTLY why I love it. There is so much opportunity here for those who love to build and innovate. If you don't believe that JS/Canvas has a future, I can't change your mind. But if you think that there is a future for browser-based games running JS, then this a very exciting field to jump into.

Before prototype, mootools, and jQuery etc., JavaScript frankly sucked. It was alerts, statusbar texts, and title bar changes. I see Canvas being in that category right now. There is a lot that needs to be done before you will see a thousand "Top 10 tricks to speed up your Canvas game" posts but that's exactly where the most exciting part lies.

"Before prototype, mootools, and jQuery etc., JavaScript frankly sucked."

Proto, mootools and jQuery are written in JavaScript. So your statement compiles to "JavaScript sucked until people figured out what it could do."

(Which is essentially your larger point, but still.)

> "JavaScript sucked until people figured out what it could do."

Actually yes. Do you remember any amazing JS apps from 2002? IE6 has been around since 2001 and even on slow machines, it can still run most of the JS apps (provided you make the fruitless effort to support it). Where were the JS apps in 2002? Only things people used JS for were form validation and annoyances.

I know these frameworks are written in JS. What I meant to say was that very few people had actually used JS to its full potential and capabilities till just 5 years ago when protoype/scriptaculous/RoR and apps like Google Maps started to show up. I wrote an Ajax-enabled app for IE6 in 2003 and it was so much more work than $.ajax({url:foo,callback:bar});

There was the nice "asteroids" microsoft DHTML demo. But Microsoft was afraid of DHTML...

> Do you remember any amazing JS apps from 2002?

Yes, I remember Outlook Web Access providing a desktop-caliber mail client in the browser using ajax and javascript.

for rather low values of desktop-caliber

mootools made javascript a better language? Javascript is a wonderful language regardless of the availability of good tools and libraries.

He didn't say the language sucked, he said 'javascript' sucked, which includes the language and what people do with it.

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