Watching a relative of mine (who wishes to stay Internet-anonymous) crank out hundreds of lines of JavaScript in four hours for the FFM questionnaire, I was able to reassess my views of the relative merits of JavaScript and Python. My intention is to produce non-trivial (AI) software which can animate agents for consumers such as yourself across the Internet (this really means games). So three requirements:
1. A real language, not a toy. I had previously believed JavaScript was a toy language but now I've had a look, I guess not (at least as far as expressive power goes, I'm not talking commercial scalability).
2. Ability to serve Internet clients. With Python this is quite hard as it runs within its own development/interpreter environment. JavaScript - in its client-side mode - is perfect.
3. Graphics. I've looked at Pygame with Python but it's not well-integrated with the Python distribution and seems hard to deploy in an Internet-client mode. JavaScript is hardly the world's best user-interface programming language but even here there seems to be progress.
A difficulty with JavaScript which my anonymous developer highlighted was its brittleness and primitive development environment (we were using Notepad++).
I have ordered "Sams Teach Yourself JQuery and JavaScript in 24 Hours" and we shall see.
