Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Today I read this prediction that mobile phone game developers will start to create JavaScript-based games, rather than using J2ME. This is partially due to the iPhone, but also because of Motorola’s MOTOMAGX.

I have to say, this is quite unfortunate. JavaScript-based games running in the Web browser have proven, in my experience, to be quite terrible. This is something that I have written about recently. First was my terrible experience trying to play Brickslayer, a JavaScript-based Breakout clone. The I had yet another pathetic experience playing a JavaScript and SVG-based Space Invaders clone.

I was just reading an article about the future of CSS. A main focus of the article is on the extremely poor layout capabilities of CSS. One such paragraph from the article goes a long way towards showing the futility of AJAX development today: CSS is great for simple web style. CSS is awful for layout. Rich Ajax apps need layout. You spend the majority of your time trying to get CSS working correctly!

When it comes to judging programming languages, there are three main factors that we need to consider: programmer productivity, the application feature set that can be implemented, and the runtime performance of the developed applications. There are, of course, many others, including memory usage, portability, and implementation cost. However, memory is plentiful these days, most languages have cross-platform implementations, and many of these implementations are free or have a low cost. So the three factors mentioned in the title become the most important ones.

I saw an article today, written by Clinton Forbes, suggesting that it’s useless to compare compiled and interpreted programming languages. The target of his wrath is this comparison of D and Ruby, with it claimed that it is “comparing apples to oranges.”

That is clearly not the case. It is often necessary, and quite acceptable, to compare two programming languages. Both Ruby and D allow for a human to instruct a computer how to perform various tasks. Thus they are the same thing. The execution method (compilation versus interpretation) is nothing but yet another factor to be considered when performing a comparison.

Michi Kono recently wrote about how the most talented Web developers are usually also the most talented application developers. I propose that we take it a step further: a great Web developer is usually a superb application developer. Or in a different light, a great Web developer is a waste of a really great application developer.

Those who follow recent trends in Web development have no doubt heard of “scrollovers“. It’s a JavaScript- and CSS-based method for making the text of a typical hyperlink “scroll” upwards, from one color to another. I don’t doubt that others will adapt the technique to other uses.

When the computing world moved from manually toggling input switches to machine code encoded on paper tape, there was a vast improvement in programmer

I recently wrote about the troubles I had using the JavaScript-based Brickslayer game. Please read my earlier article to get a good idea about the numerous problems I ran into. Also read this comment to that article. Somebody going by the name joe, stated the following: quite right. JavaScript is NOT for games or animation. However for most other things on the web, it works quite well.

Last night at the pub, a friend and colleague of mine was telling me of a recent experience he had at a company he was doing some IT work for. I think the lesson learned is a very important one, and thus I wish to share it. But first I’ll describe the situation he encountered.

Ricardo Herrmann just left an excellent comment to an article I had written about the general inadequacy of JavaScript-based Web applications. In his comment, he points out the Brickslayer game. It’s essentially a JavaScript-based Breakout clone. And like Ricardo pointed out, Breakout ran quite well on an Atari 2600. Keep in mind that the Atari 2600 is, well, rather under-powered compared to typical desktop computers today.