alt Hacker NewsTo me the Turtle programming language lot more interesting than Javascript in a browser. Sure JS has all the capabilities, but as I child, all I wanted to was to turn pixels on and off on the screen. With only that knowledge, and my imagination, I felt I could build whole worlds on the computer.
That is what makes something interesting and intriguing. Once I had the taste of that first pixel, and I was hooked.
But look at JS/Canvas stuff? I still need to look up how to put a single pixel on a canvas. I am not sure it is even possible!
(Btw, do you know that in those times, graphics libs could read the color back from an onscreen pixel? Now I can do collision detection for my games!)
But you might say "But that is the wrong way!" and "You won't be able to do much that way", Who cares, I want to have my way, with out having to do a ton of stuff that is seemingly orthogonal to what I am trying to do..
You can have the best of both Worlds today thanks to https://snap.berkeley.edu namely block based visual programming, no syntax error, no installation (even works offline once loaded) and you can make the turtle move... but you don't have to stop there, you can make your own blocks... and those blocks can even be JavaScript so that when you inexorably get bored of what was once an exciting turtle, you can leverage all that but control it with a GamePad or whatever weird things I listed before.
To be clear though, I am NOT advocating for JavaScript, I'm just arguing its potential, today, is nuts.