Cross Platform Game Development
Browsing the web one cold evening while writing this book led me to a technical web site featuring the following quote, attributed to Herbert Mayer:
“No programming language is perfect. There is not even a single
best language; there are only languages well suited or perhaps
poorly suited for particular purposes.”
This kind of contextual philosophy — that everything is defined by context, that languages are not in themselves either good or bad, or one thing or another — need not apply only to programming languages.
Indeed, it may equally apply to many other facets of computing, from graphic design application to whether one selects an open-source web browser. But perhaps this philosophy applies most of all to the computing concept of “platforms,” meaning operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Linux. Perhaps platforms too are defined by context and not by themselves. In the current computing climate, one divided by the controversies of open-source software versus proprietary software, patenting, DRM, and copy-protection scandals, it’s easy to take up positions and arguments for one or the other — believing it to be wholly wrong or wholly right — and then lose sight of the context. But if platforms really are defined by context, by how people use them, the kinds of things one can do on the platform, the kinds of circumstances in which the platform has developed; then to lose sight of context is to lose sight altogether
