jwz, if you've been following him, is inherently pragmatic. He's a follower of the philosophy that the computer, and by extension the frameworks and languages to program it, should be subservient to the programmer. They shouldn't tell you how to live your life or behave like a stubborn mule when, for whatever well intentioned reason, people decided to overhaul the spec everyone depended on.
I think his argument is that OpenGL ES should have had an "optimal" mode, where performance is best using the newer calls, and "compatible" mode, where if you don't care about performance and just want to port, you can get by. This appears to be what the jwzgl layer does.
Essentially he's just whining that porting his project is difficult because the API doesn't have the more beginner friendly(but inefficient) drawing calls that used to be there. OpenGL ES is not designed to be beginner friendly, it's meant to give low-level access for high performance graphics. It's perfectly reasonable to use an abstraction layer on top of that for simple drawing, it's not that hard, and a quick google would probably find many projects that have done so.
Personally if your going for simple, and not performance, there are much better ways to design the api than glBegin().
So all those calls are the worst of both worlds, awkward, and slow.
OpenGL ES is for "embedded systems" which basically means phones. That means inefficient programming drains the battery. Sure if jwz want's to punish his user's I guess that's his prerogative but it seems like a good decision to provide an API that discourages bad practices.
Basically they decided to get rid of the cruft. OpenGL 1.x was designed in 1992? GPUs fundamentally changed in the mid 2000s and the decisions made for OpenGL 1.x no longer fit.
The iPad graphics subsystem absolutely destroys anything around when the OpenGL spec was released and many of these screen-savers were designed against hardware that's unbelievably slow compared to an iPad.
He's not making a game that's going to drain the battery in ten seconds flat, he's porting screensavers made in the late 1990s that were never heavy-duty to start with.
Sure. But OpenGL ES was not designed for the iPad. The decision to reject immediate mode was made in 2003, for the mobile devices of that time. And it is used in the industry for devices much less powerful than the iPad, even today.
It continues to be a popular choice for anything like the iPad, where there is no legacy software based on regular OpenGL, because it is a much cleaner and much easier to implement stack, and because if you are writing new software you should never be using all of that old deprecated cruft anyways.
