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0 pointsjrockway16y ago0 comments

But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.

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gloob16y ago· 2 in thread

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but I'm not certain what that has to do with the point being made. Could you explain it in greater detail?

My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method. You can write many types of apps that way, certainly, but you pretty much give up anything so much as pretending to be performance. Additionally, it prevents you from doing anything particularly low-level - if you were desperate enough, you could always set up a web interface to gcc or something, but that won't help you if you want to hack on a device driver or something. Systems programmers are people too, you know. ;)

stcredzero16y ago

My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method.

But if you recall what Hypercard stacks were like, then putting it on a website that's specially tailored to make it easy, combined with a local app to make things more seamless, might actually be a money making proposition.

Put the hacking open/closed politics aside. What do you think about the idea as a business?

jrockwayOP16y ago

The point that was made above was, "there has been no progress because demos from 15 years ago had as good as graphics as HTML5 games have today".

But the difference is that HTML5 games are games, and demos from 15 years ago were demos. Writing an entire app like you write a demo is quite difficult; hand-optimized assembly takes a lot longer to write than Java. The improvement over the last 15 years is in the programming language tools and runtimes, not the graphics that the programs produce.

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