I am new to computer programming and have some experience programming with python. I am thinking of developing a program that does physics simulations (projectiles, circular motion, damped simple harmonic motion systems etc.) as a hobby project. I would like to write the program that it could be run by a non-technical user(my fellow students) on a variety of platforms (mac, windows etc.) without any setup and python doesn’t seem to be a good option for building such a program so I am looking for an alternative. JavaScript has caught my attention, as it seems to be quite powerful on modern browsers, especially in conjunction with HTML5. I would like to know whether it is suitable to use JavaScript for this type application, and some information as to where I should start (I have no JavaScript knowledge)
Thanks in advance!
Yes I did have a look at the similar threads on the site but I want write something by myself than using a 3rd party library (other than for the frontend, if possible) 🙂
What is actually your question? 🙂
Can you write a physics simulation in Python?
Yes, of course.
Can you write a physics simulation in Javascript?
Yup.
Will it be useful?
Yes, probably.
Will it be efficient?
Not as efficient as an implementation with C, to be sure. But for small-scale simulations should you should have quite enough power with current JIT javascript interpreters. Tens or hundreds of objects on 30fps looks like a safe approximation, I think.
Can you make use of modern HTML when writing a physics simulation in JS?
The simulation and the display are two different things, but yes, if you want to make a graphics frontend to your simulation, the modern features of HTML and CSS could be certainly useful. But if you write it in any other language, you still have nice choices for visualization.
How to learn JavaScript?
There’s plenty of tutorials online, but I don’t know any particular one to recommend; perhaps anyone else can fill for me here.