[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> more flash digest [mcelroy x2, klima x2, fahey]

[Sawad <sawad@utensil.net>]

At 08:17 PM 4/25/02 -0400, nettime's_kompressor wrote:
>From: "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>
>Subject: RE: <nettime> un-plugged-in digest [sawad, fahey, napier]
>Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 12:44:02 -0400
>
> > Flash remains essentially "media," as you define it, much
> > as Quicktime. I don't think that scripting separates it from
> > being so.
>...
> > I also think that many non-artist programmers would resist
> > referring to Flash as a programming language. Well, they
> > would giggle. Programmers tend to think of C/C++, Fortran,
> > Basic, Java as their materials.
>
>
>Any programmer who giggles at the idea of Flash as a programming
>language is uninformed. Your comparison of Flash to Quicktime is
>ridiculously uninformed.


Really? But Lev's comparison is not? I should just point out that my 
"comparison" included a gloss on the programming possibilities offered by 
Quicktime through its libraries. I was trying to supplement Lev's own 
incomplete "comparison" of Flash and Quicktime. You, on the other hand, 
seem to offer very little of substance in this debate, except a lot of 
"evidence" that ActionScript and JavaScript are indeed programming 
languages. I mean, who gives a shit? I don't. Call it what you will. My 
comments about some programmers not considering it real programming is 
based on actual conversations I have had with friends and acquaintances who 
happen to be engineers and computer scientists. So, call it what you will. 
You certainly don't need my approval. I certainly don't feel any need to 
defend some technico-semantic "battleground."

On the other hand, my post was intended to address a number of issues in 
Lev's Flash posts. Among the issues I addressed was how liberty (from 
media) and programming might not necessarily go hand in hand the way Lev 
seemed to advance. I believe Napier addressed some similar issues. I'll let 
you go back and read what I wrote rather than try to summarize it here.



>ActionScript is a robust, object-oriented, ECMA-262-compliant
>programming language, roughly identical in syntax, structure, and
>sophistication to JavaScript. I'm not saying that JavaScript is the most
>powerful language in the world, but you cannot deny that it IS a
>programming language.


Gosh! That camp sound like fun, and just in time for Summer!! I hope it 
will be as fun as the Lisp camp where my parents sent me when I was a kid.

However, as I mentioned above, I really don't need to take "another" look. 
I don't feel in the least the need to defend my knowledge of programming. 
To me, everything is programming, to one degree or another. That includes 
writing and reading prose. If you feel that some people are not 
acknowledging you as a programmer because you program in Flash, then that's 
their problem. You go.


>Anyway, it sounds like the last time you (and many others in the snobby
>"Flash is not real programming!" camp) looked at Flash was in 1999. Take
>another look. As I said to someone else recently, multimedia is only
>about 5% of what Flash is. Check out this site to learn about how
>ActionScript is a 'real' programming language:
>    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/12/07/action.html


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