I think if you want people to enjoy what you build, JS is probably the quickest route. And I think you see it being used in "intro" programming courses to teach middle school or high school kids for that reason -- it quickly shows something visual where platforms, dependencies, and complex libs have made that harder elsewhere.
It's unfortunate it's a mess of a language and evolving too rapidly.
GWBasic, QBasic, and later TI-Basic were some of my first major forays into software, and I worry a bit when there's not a super easy way to get a game out there - however simple, because those are great gateway drugs.
For BASIC, this meant easy access to graphics modes, and some basic "BEEP" and noise playing ability.
These were all installed by default -- something that's not true of most programming tools today (well not entirely, OS X does have them! But not game/graphics libs), and having the source code to things like gorillas and snake helped. Many people could discover them completely by accident and boom, you're a programmer!
And that's all you need.
JS has a bit more learning curve.
OT: I think the glossy production of games these days may also be a negative factor, for those that know they can take millions of dollars, people trying to reproduce this result at a young age (or even as older hobbyists) may get disllusioned, give up, and not build something.
Just as DevOps culture has encouraged sharing how tools works at meetups, I wish this happened more for indie/homebrewed game development.
It's unfortunate it's a mess of a language and evolving too rapidly.
GWBasic, QBasic, and later TI-Basic were some of my first major forays into software, and I worry a bit when there's not a super easy way to get a game out there - however simple, because those are great gateway drugs.
For BASIC, this meant easy access to graphics modes, and some basic "BEEP" and noise playing ability.
These were all installed by default -- something that's not true of most programming tools today (well not entirely, OS X does have them! But not game/graphics libs), and having the source code to things like gorillas and snake helped. Many people could discover them completely by accident and boom, you're a programmer!
And that's all you need.
JS has a bit more learning curve.
OT: I think the glossy production of games these days may also be a negative factor, for those that know they can take millions of dollars, people trying to reproduce this result at a young age (or even as older hobbyists) may get disllusioned, give up, and not build something.
Just as DevOps culture has encouraged sharing how tools works at meetups, I wish this happened more for indie/homebrewed game development.