| > There's plenty of reasons to use a web stack even if you know other languages. It's inherently crossplatform, has an extensive library, and is extremely quick to iterate on. The GP's point was that, in the year 2019, none of these features are unique to the web. • For "frameworks", there's Silverlight, Adobe Air, Haxe, and—strangely enough—Flash itself, which still works just fine if your goal is to ship a standalone "projector" app rather than something that runs in a browser. • Or you can use a cross-platform scripting language (e.g. Python) with a cross-platform GUI toolkit (e.g. QT, WxWidgets.) • Or you can use a not-cross-platform language (e.g. C#) but just use the (pretty large) subset of that language that is compatible with a third-party cross-platform runtime (e.g. Mono). Before you laugh, this is exactly how many companies code games to be cross-platform: they just write them for Win32 but constantly test them under Wine to ensure they aren't breaking Wine compatibility. Then they ship one native version and two virtualization-layer-wrapped versions. • Or—horror of horrors—you can just use Java, and use the various Java-to-native-X compilers to target mobile platforms like iOS. (It worked well enough for Minecraft!) |
The web has all of them, I have yet to find another platform/language that meets all the same criteria.
Combine all of the above with a rich toolchain and extreme dev tools portability -- I can be up and running on basically any machine in minutes. As well as ease of deployment (at least for hobby projects).
All of those other platforms are, for me, less in one of the axes I care about. I've developed extensively in Python, C#, and Java for both personal and professional projects and while I like developing in them for many, many reasons, when I need to start a new project I nearly always find myself reaching for Javascript as the starting point.