Deciding on a Programming Language

I thought this would be easy, but this is proving to be a bit more trouble than I expected. From my criteria in the last post, there are a very large number of languages/platforms that I could use, for example just a few of these are:

So I could go for a deep insight into them all, but that would take a while. But that is not really the aim of this, and my experience is that no language is exactly right.

I’m going to start by picking from the list above and eliminating…which is why this post won’t end with the final choice. Easy ones first though…

Unity

Unity is a great professional platform for games. It’s based around C#, which is what I mainly program with at work at the moment, it’s got good support for monetisation, it compiles to multiple platforms. However, there is one big reason I’m avoiding it, and that’s that it’s not truly free for everyone and I’m hoping this can be as accessible as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for paying for software (it’s how I make my money) but I need to be sure that people who are reading this don’t feel that they have to pay anything to get started. Perhaps I’ll have another look properly another time, but for this project, I am going elsewhere.

Haxe

Of all the options, this is the one I know the best. I programmed all my flash games in Haxe (eg Colourshift) and I like it a lot. So why not use it? Fundamentally only because I want to try something new. I would recommend trying Haxe if you want, though.

JavaScript

Fundamentally, this is where all of the languages will end up, so I could skipĀ  the rest and go straight here. This is easy to dismiss, though. There’s a good reason why so many languages compile into JavaScript – it’s a horrible mess that needs more structure added to it. Almost all of what I can do in pure JavaScript I can do in all of the other languages. This is a bit like choosing assembly language as a programming language. As a purist exercise it’s an interesting endeavour, but it’s not a practical solution.

TypeScript

So if JavaScript isn’t ok, why not TypeScript? Here we’re building on a basic language, but adding some structure and fixing some of the flaws. It still allows the use of libraries such as JQuery too. I’m not 100% against this one. It resolves some of the concerns with the inadequacy of JavaScript, but I have a feeling it’s still building a castle on sand. I think that pretty much anything that compiles into JavaScript will have the same advantages of TypeScript, but without the baggage. I’ve not dismissed this completely yet, but I’m not feeling that it’s the right move.

Next Time

I’m going to leave the decision for a bit longer. Next time I’ll have a look at the remaining ones in the list a bit more and see if I can pick one.


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