<nettime> flash. flash. flash. digest [sawad, klima, hwang]

["nettime's_word-processor" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Sawad <sawad@utensil.net>
     Re: <nettime> more flash digest [mcelroy x2, klima x2, fahey]
John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>
     [Nettime-bold] Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Really Viral Marketing
Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
     <nettime> Flash as programming language

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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 19:12:05 -0400
From: Sawad <sawad@utensil.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> more flash digest [mcelroy x2, klima x2, fahey]

Joseph,

Maybe you can get Vince McMahon!

Seriously, I think that working with a text editor and a C compiler is 
probably a lot more straightforward than needing to have "strategies for 
migration or emulation" or not knowing whether "All this might change." 
Otherwise, I am happy that you are enjoying "programming," or "feasting," 
or whatever anyone else wants to call it, in Flash or ActionScript. You 
gotta do whatevah works for you.

Again, if this is all you people got out of my post, then I must have 
failed terribly in communicating my arguments with Lev Manovich.

sawad


At 08:17 PM 4/25/02 -0400, nettime's_kompressor wrote:
>Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 09:42:57 -0400
>From: "Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]" 
><joseph@electrichands.com>
>Subject: Re: <nettime> un-plugged-in digest [sawad, fahey, napier]
>
>
>Having started on Qbasic in the 70's (i was a very young prodigy), munched on
 <...

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Subject: [Nettime-bold] Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Really Viral Marketing
From: John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 15:14:11 -0400

this is an intriguing idea, and i'm gonna play devil's advocate and not
reject the notion off hand.  you rightfully say that our machines are
our souls, but personally i own more than one (soul?).  if say, i made
one of my old (as in a year) clunkers just a net media machine, what do
i care if some spare cycles are used for a render farm, as long as my
tunes don't get interupted, this could actually be a really "sound"
idea. i have any number of old machines that are more than capable of
playing mp3's, if offering my spare cpu cycles, on a machine i only use
for media playback, solves the whole payment problem, i'm down with it.

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Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 09:41:18 -0400
From: Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
Subject: <nettime> Flash as programming language

Christopher Fahey wrote:

>Any programmer who giggles at the idea of Flash as a programming
>language is uninformed. Your comparison of Flash to Quicktime is
>ridiculously uninformed.
>
>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.

Speaking as a programmer: I would never say that Flash isn't 
programming. But it's a sort of programming I don't ever want to do 
again -- in the same way that I'd rather not code any JavaScript or 
Visual Basic ever again, either.

Like a few other people on this list, I've been programming for a 
while, and while you quickly learn that languages are on some level 
all the same -- I've coded in Pascal, Scheme, C, C++, Java, 
JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Perl, Visual Basic, ColdFusion, etc. -- you 
also learn that that similarity can get really boring. I got to a 
point about a year ago where I realized that I was basically solving 
all the same low-level problems, only using different symbols to do 
it. Life's too short.

These days, I look for languages and techniques that allow me to 
leave the low-level stuff in the past and build bigger, to think more 
about the bigger picture instead of the petty details. For me, that 
involves using object-oriented languages and techniques. (And as a 
side note: the term "object-oriented" has a drastically different 
meaning in the tech-arts world than it does in the 
software-engineering world; here I use it in the software-engineering 
sense.) From what I understand of ActionScript, it is not a language 
that will let me use those techniques.

Yes, Flash is a programming language. (If you want to use a geek term 
here, you can say ActionScript is "Turing complete".) But so is 
assembly language, and who wants to use that stuff?

F.
-- 

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