Programming and Scripting :: Interview with Lua's daddy

I tend to think, in the click-n-play web world, many people have lost patience with installing anything, so a lot of things will eventually all move onto the server.

For example, Joost has been failing badly, partly because they insisted on installing a large client. Now they have a plugin instead, but they are moving to an entirely flash-based platform - nothing extra to install. After YouTube, who wants to install anything (other than flash) to play online videos in their browser?

The people I know are mainly associated in some way with the Gnome world, some ex-Red Hat. Fedora and the like uses a lot of Python. One gave the "looks like line noise" response to opinions about Perl.

I know Python has a fundamentally different philosophy to Perl. Python typically has a "one best way" of doing anything; often there is only one way. This helps avoid weird programming since you generally copy and learn the way to do task X. It also helps make it very readable since various code memes are easily recognizable.

Perl, otoh, has a "many ways" philosophy. It is rich with different approaches to the same problem, and no one way is necessarily the best or only way in a given application, so there is a lot of flexibility and power but also coder stylistic preferences. It is often accused of being hard to read and maintain as opposed to Python, and there is some truth in that.

But I guess fashion has a lot to do with it also.

Personally hoping Flash will eventually 1) die, 2) become open so it can be reworked into something lighter and more secure, or 3) be replaced by something lighter and more secure. This is from someone who once liked Flash, and depended on it for income.

Then again, that's not what this thread is about.

Same feelings about Flash. Right now Adobe has everyone by the sensitibe parts.

and how about this:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

this is quite good but they hav only a player currently.....

Can't say I'm interested in Gnash yet either. I intended to try it a while ago, but after seeing its dependencies I began to think it's probably not much lighter.
On a side note, I reinstalled the Flash plugin the other day, just for giggles. It almost instantly degraded my web browsing experience, so I removed it the next session. It's not entirely flash itself, by the way, but the way it's being used by everyone, simply because it is easy to develop for many different tasks (not because it is actually suitable for most tasks). Fortunately it's not commonly used for important tasks, so it can still be safely avoided most of the time.

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