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Comment by _akhe | Hacker News Reader

It's all going to end up in JavaScript anyway.

I say this as a joke, yet: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-unity-webgl

  Simply rendering your Unity Application within your React Application is just the beginning! The Unity Context exposes a lot more fun functions and properties to play around with such as two way communication or requesting fullscreen or a pointerlock. The possibilities are endless, what's next is up to you!

Love it or hate it. Everything ends up in JavaScript!

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I don't hate it. JS has its worts, but so does every language. I don't think there is a single language even close to JS for lowering the bar of entry to software development. All of the bad things about it that "real computer science" folks complain about are the exact same features which give it a far more broad reach than Rust or Golang. Software development experiences the exact same problem that the internet at large has suffered. The lower and lower bar of entry invites less and less competent folks to create things they never before would have been able to create. Some of these things are genuinely useful and we benefit greatly by lowering the bar, and most of these things end up being shit because the people who made them really had no clue what they were doing.

Lowering the bar of participation greatly increases the amount of shit that is created, but also increases the amount of exceptional examples which can come from a domain. If 80% of everything created is almost complete garbage, then lowering the bar of entry for participating will exponentially increase the amount of shit out there. But it will also enable a few really great apps which wouldn't have existed otherwise. I think we need better filtering than to raise the bar so only true experts can participate.

Or it just happened to monopolise the browser at a time when the web was being invented, and has nothing to do with the features of the language.

As a language for new developers is terrible: 100 different ways to do anything, most of them a muddle of paradigms that's inexplicable to anyone without 2 decades of experience, and so on.

Imagine a new developer using ChatGPT to generate: python, C, go, etc. vs. generating javascript. Most of the generated js is incomphrensible to newbies, but for the others generally obvious.

> Or it just happened to monopolise the browser at a time when the web was being invented, and has nothing to do with the features of the language

But applets were doing a lot more in the 90's and Flash dominated into the 2010s. However you feel about JS today, it's difficult to say it was all "first-mover advantage".

Was Flash ever really good for anything close to normal programming?

And Java applets with their loading times and dependence on the visitor having Java installed ... nah, not really a competitor.

A video about their upcoming spatial SDK ("augments") already leaked [0] and you are correct, it's based on JavaScript, using their Spark toolkit [1] which is hardly surprising - when the company already ships a production AR dev kit, why would they not use it?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svlL_ndNdj0

[1] https://spark.meta.com/

Atwood's law

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