Silverlight versus X

[Lashmush]

Well, since I took myself and others WAAAY too seriously in my last thread that in the end seemed to do pretty well (i asked to have it removed since it was kind of embarrassing tbh) i thought we could discuss pros and cons of silverlight versus your preferred choice in webapplications and their respective softwares.

So simply put, what application do you use, what languages or whatnot is involved, and how would you motivate that it is equal to or better than the current distribution of silverlight? were talking anything from basic html + css to XAML, from simple PHP stuff to massively dynamic and versatile sites that work equal to or better than a site using silverlight in some way or form. doesnt have to be all aspects of it, but atleast one.

I motivate Silverlight by simply having a massive damn hunch (on my back) about it being the next big thing once it reaches full 3D potential and gets some multiplatform support, or at the very least, full windows support so its like a full fledged extension of your browser more than just a nifty design or database access thing. I discuss it alot with my brother in denmark, who works with alot of C# and other languages professionally, and hes been an MS skeptic as far as ive understood until this language was released and microsoft did the MS Visual Studio 2005 stuff and later versions aswell as the new .NET things. guess its a "love it or hate it" situation with coders.

Knowledge is power if im gonna start a website with a fully operating 3D game inside it so any help is appreciated, but my site is completely on ice until im less crazy and more basic bohemian that ive allways been. delusional and living life waaay too carelessly but wtf, im 21...

this whole place is new to me, and that last thread i made was a horrible first impression, so you'll have to excuse me for that bullshit.

So quick TL;DR summary:

1. Silverlight - next big thing? what will it need to become successful at the very least within its own platform (assuming multiplatform isnt microsofts first concern)
2. Alternate app - why do you think it kicks more ass than silverlight and how on a "coding for dummies" way would you break it down to a friend thats completely outside the loop on the coding world and programming in general?
3. why do i have to suffer blueballs right now? (hint: i have a GF now...)

i really think you guys made more points and had more constructive criticism in there than i managed to read in time, but the posts were not only intelligent, they were very targeted and specific so i kind of felt a little painted into a corner about it all, lol...

i prefer design in the MS Expression Suite anyway, its quite nice actually and works like a charm on both XP and Vista to my knowledge (only tried on Vista).

[GustTheASGuy]

At 3/31/09 08:35 PM, Lashmush wrote: I motivate Silverlight by simply having a massive damn hunch (on my back) about it being the next big thing once it reaches full 3D potential and gets some multiplatform support, or at the very least, full windows support so its like a full fledged extension of your browser more than just a nifty design or database access thing. I discuss it alot with my brother in denmark, who works with alot of C# and other languages professionally, and hes been an MS skeptic as far as ive understood until this language was released and microsoft did the MS Visual Studio 2005 stuff and later versions aswell as the new .NET things. guess its a "love it or hate it" situation with coders.

The first problem is that it's made by Microsoft. This means that even if/when Silverlight has some use, they'll still likely go about evolving it the wrong way, leaving portability and open source as the last thing they're interested in.
MS is gaining some credit lately with Windows 7, but it'll take a while before anyone starts liking them.

As for .NET, just about everyone likes it, though it would never be my platform of choice.
For desktop applications I dig Qt (to begin with it's FOSS and crossplatform, also Webkit), but if for some reason I ever need to do serverside programming, thankfully I have the capacity to use Ur instead of mindfucks like ASP and PHP.

Then to RIAs, my first choice is of course Flash, however in my opinion Adobe is very incompetent as shown by their need to make new CS releases at half the interval they should in order to support the infinite monkeys writing their software, each release of the Flash IDE featuring double memory requirements and not much else. (I still use v8 + Flex/haXe)

And the Flash Player, while it's pretty good, is full of problems like all the security solutions (limitations) to issues that no one was aware were there, rendering that has been shown to be slower at drawing lines with Actionscript than natively.
In order to do anything impressive like 3d, sound and network manipulation the API has to be hacked and raped, although it's not too hard.

I have a lot of other complaints but it doesn't make sense to talk about that within this topic.
Basically, Flash Player is crossplatform, everyone that matters has it, and it doesn't tend to fail too bad (except when an upgraded Player breaks something due to its ..security innovations).
On the other hand, two of three of the Microsoft-affiliated sites that used Silverlight to play videos or something that I actually wanted to see last month pretty much failed in Firefox by holding it up a while and then silently crashing. Brilliant. I can pull an equivalent (well-made, if the one worked) Flash app out of my ass in under an hour.

So while I do wish something took over Flash, Silverlight is no thanks.

What it could be is plain Javascript if browsers provided a rich API (again the biggest problem is IE, Acid3 lolol) for rendering graphics and sound and shit.
Webkit's Squirrelfish is kinda leading the way there because it apparently beats Tamarin (the AS3 interpreter in Flash), where Squirrelfish compiles Javascript dynamically while Tamarin's only compiler (apart from haXe), Flex, is a stupid Java implementation that takes three seconds to start up and a second more for every thousand lines.

Alternatively, perhaps Google is up to something. Unity is also looking good, if you've heard, though it's not general usage.

Until either of those two possibilities happen, everyone who is not delusional about Silverlight is sticking to Flash.

[Lashmush]

What i need is basically the best damn shitz for making a 3D webapplication (interactive game) that when beaten unlocks the real site. not too hard at first, but I'll make sequels myself once I analyze and start understanding the code. I'm at the very least, WAAAY past hello world bullshit. just a little bit of syntax i dont get right now. but its mostly Assembly, VB and C# that I find interesting and only the latter two that I can work in, since assembly is like... well its fucking assembly, the title says it all.

[GustTheASGuy]

Why VB? Don't use it if you don't have to. And you were complaining about Actionscript. Assembly is completely irrelevant.
Doesn't look like Silverlight is any good at 3d yet, so use either Unity or Flash. Flash is hardly impressive, so Unity it is. It uses .NET all the same.

[CronoMan]

At 4/2/09 10:03 AM, GustTheASGuy wrote:

leaving portability and open source as the last thing they're interested in.

Open source isn't the perfect solution - look at Visual Studio vs. Eclipse for instance

As for .NET, just about everyone likes it, though it would never be my platform of choice.
For desktop applications I dig Qt (to begin with it's FOSS and crossplatform, also Webkit), but if for some reason I ever need to do serverside programming, thankfully I have the capacity to use Ur instead of mindfucks like ASP and PHP.

ASP.NET is far superior to any other web development platform in regards to speed, code management and operability.
.NET is by far the best thing to have come out of any software company the last ten years, instead of bein anal about cross-platform, you should be more open minded and realise the potential .NET unleashes

So while I do wish something took over Flash, Silverlight is no thanks.

Why not silverlight? It's faster, more robust and isn't limited by a sandbox enviroment the size of

What it could be is plain Javascript if browsers provided a rich API (again the biggest problem is IE, Acid3 lolol) for rendering graphics and sound and shit.

Javascript is an abomination. If technology is to move forward, javascript needs to be annihilated.
What bothers me with so much web development is that nearly no languages has any datatypes for some odd reason. Why not? Are they intentionally trying to make it ineffective and insecure? Why can a number be read as a string and vice-versa? What is the purpose? Javascript has a shitload of bad design implementations and a faulty "semi" object orientation which somehow and for some reason doesn't really support objects, and some classes (not all, just some) can be accessed globally while others can't. You have classes defined that in later days makes no sense (navigator for one) because there has been no planning when they designed it, they just developed it just like the retards at PHP designs their product - step-by-step; "Hey this might be cool, I'll write some code and throw it in there, see what happens" which obviously isn't something you should do on something this important. That's how you design a stinking pile of crap. Every cool feature in javascript has been disabled, and they had to do this for security. Now if javascript had actually been planned from the start, nothing would have to be removed or disabled. Granted that the internet is inherently insecure because of its implementation, there's no reason to further break it down by implementing javascript in the way that it is. Why is performance even still an issue? They have had nearly 15 years on improving the performance (Mozilla) but somehow every javascript engine is still horribly slow. I read an article about OpenGL implementation in FF, and some douchebag actually claimed that javascript was getting so efficient that it in the near future may take over application development for C/C++ - MY FUCKING ASS IT WILL. If that happens, I'll wipe out engineer from my title and become a fucking plumber. Do you realise how many years that will drag everything back? Thankfully the person who said that obviously can't be a programmer. No sane programmer would even think that thought. Why do some people continue pushing for something that is quite obviously a really really bad idea.
There is a shitload of things that were not taken into consideration on the initial draft of javascript
Oh and were is the entire documentation for javascript? Does it even exist? Each time you google for a javascript function, you'll get sent to a different location which just happens to have the answer, there is no reference.javascript.com or anything like that as far as I know. The closest might be w3schools, but that's still a long way from a complete reference. I have this regular train of thought when it comes to things almost everybody find difficult; either everybody has a problem (not likely) or the thing that causes the problem is in fact the problem. In this instance, javascript is the problem.
Well, javascript shouldn't take all the blame, some should go to HTTP, HTML and CSS as well, for being so 1960. In fact, the entire web needs to be restarted, flush all the junk shit and replace it with something more modern and intelligent, where you wouldn't need an extra SSL layer just to provide BASIC SECURITY. Or that you wouldn't need hacks like AJAX to provide a two-way communication, because honestly, that's what it is. It might look cool and do some great things, but holy mother of fuck, what the hell? Problem is that web was designed for DOCUMENTS like newspapers and such. Maybe books I don't know, but the point is that it is text-related. And stuff like this pisses me off, because that's not what the internet is used for anymore. You know "floating layouts"? I wonder if I am the only person in the entire world that realises that the float-property is how an image related to text, it's not designed to make layouts with, but people still say you should. In fact everyone says that and I start to wonder if it's a really good idea to use this for something it was obviously not meant for. Why not make something that is designed for the purpose that people use it for? Am I the only sane person left on the entire planet? Am I the only one that is critical of current implementations?

Got a bit carried off, but Javascript != future

If you manage to find anything more half-assed than javascript, you tell me, because I sure as hell can't think of anything

Until either of those two possibilities happen, everyone who is not delusional about Silverlight is sticking to Flash.

There's no doubt of which technology is superior, the only thing that you really can complain about is the lack of cross-platform support - that's it. It's faster, its cleaner, it supports a shitload of more interesting features (like for instance appearance templates)

Flash should be replaced by better technology, I think it's annoying that people are so religious about certain things - it's counter-productive. If nobody challenges the current technology, nothing will ever get any better. That's just simple fact. Even people that only use windows stick to flash, and even though they don't have any experience or knowledge , they still continue to have an opinion about something they have no clue what's about

IMO if silverlight was cross-platform, flash should be wiped off the face of the earth. But I know that even though silverlight would be cross-platform, people would refuse to use it. Because people are religious, even though you can push fact directly in the face, they will still continue using flash and talking shit about it competitors because that's simply what people do, and that's why it takes forever before anything improves.

Like why the fuck do we get people posting topics on batch scripts? What the fucking hell? Why do people write C applications in VI / VIM on Unix? Are people purposely trying to keep progress back? What is the deal here?

I've actually seen people who use GIMP over Adobe Photoshop, and I wonder what kind of a self-deluding mind that makes those kind of decisions, ok open source is nice for some things, but when you end up accepting things that are a pain in the ass because you're principally agins proprietary software, you're a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. In most cases, proprietary software has shown to have the highest level of quality, there's no denying that. There's a shitload of really really amazing applications that really kick the ass of any open source or freeware applications, like for instance 3D Studio MAX, Adobe Photoshop, Visual Studio, Discrete Combustion, .NET, ProTools, Microsoft SQL Server, CoreAVC, SmartFTP - none of which have any free counterparts which even begins to think about being a viable alternative.

I think it's cool that people make software for free and all, but that software shouldn't be judged under any special criteria, it's just not a very productive way of progressing

[GustTheASGuy]

Dude, shut your fucking yapper. Haha. :D

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote: Open source isn't the perfect solution - look at Visual Studio vs. Eclipse for instance

Yeah, it's often beneficial when companies have money to throw at stuff. And Eclipse is effing Java.
The web I want to be open-source though.

ASP.NET is far superior to any other web development platform in regards to speed, code management and operability.

Absolutely the impression I got from your suicidal wailing on chat. :p

.NET is by far the best thing to have come out of any software company the last ten years, instead of bein anal about cross-platform, you should be more open minded and realise the potential .NET unleashes

I like Windows and I like Linux. .......And some people like OSX.
Software that depends on a single platform isn't worth the future.

Got a bit carried off, but Javascript != future

You're mostly complaining about the web DOM. JS is not strictly associated with a particular DOM as it can be used for any sort of scripting. And whose fault is it that the web DOM is so messed up, the least compliant browser from the browser wars? :D

It's not that you develop in JS, it's basically a target for generated code. Google's web applications use generated JS, and haXe supports it, even though the only benefit for using haXe is proper classes and the extra type stuff.

The future is generated code and functional languages, in the hundred or so years you average programmers will develop the required extra brain cells to understand that programs can be written to do what you're doing. Then it won't matter if you target JS, C or H/LLVM, or all of.
At any rate, don't worry about me not knowing what the future is. I just don't want to confuuuuse your tiny brain! >:p

There's no doubt of which technology is superior, the only thing that you really can complain about is the lack of cross-platform support - that's it. It's faster, its cleaner, it supports a shitload of more interesting features (like for instance appearance templates)

It.. It doesn't work. You know?

IMO if silverlight was cross-platform, flash should be wiped off the face of the earth.

Yes, but can it be? Porting .NET 3.5? Microsoft? Yeah, no.

Like why the fuck do we get people posting topics on batch scripts? What the fucking hell? Why do people write C applications in VI / VIM on Unix? Are people purposely trying to keep progress back? What is the deal here?

Batch -> morons with nothing better to do.
C -> safety (in the sense that it's what people know and can rely on). C definitely can't be discarded yet.

[DearonElensar]

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote: Like why the fuck do we get people posting topics on batch scripts? What the fucking hell? Why do people write C applications in VI / VIM on Unix? Are people purposely trying to keep progress back? What is the deal here?

So i suppose that people who still live as their ancestors did in places like Antarctica and the jungle hold the progress of society back?
I mean, what justification for such a statement is there? How can you keep back progress if you never intended to join "progress"? Do you have the only true definition of progress and can it only be made if it fits inside your requirements?

[CronoMan]

At 4/3/09 09:17 AM, DearonElensar wrote:

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote: Like why the fuck do we get people posting topics on batch scripts? What the fucking hell? Why do people write C applications in VI / VIM on Unix? Are people purposely trying to keep progress back? What is the deal here?

So i suppose that people who still live as their ancestors did in places like Antarctica and the jungle hold the progress of society back?

I wouldn't actually label those people as a part of a technological community. But if some of them thought "hey, we can save 2 hours by fishing from this pond which also

I mean, what justification for such a statement is there? How can you keep back progress if you never intended to join "progress"? Do you have the only true definition of progress and can it only be made if it fits inside your requirements?

My requirements aren't that extensive, I'm saying that it would've been a shame if people didn't buy color tv's because they felt comfortable with monochrome screens. The more people that are willing to outgrow ancient methods and implementation, the more people will support those who actually try to broaden the horizon for development

As for software, let the market decide, that's what it's there for
Silverlight hasn't got a chance to defeat flash as it is right now, even though I think that it indeed should replace flash, there are way too many that feel cross-platform is too important, so it won't happen until microsoft realises that they really are unable to compete with flash right now. No matter how much better silverlight is :P

[DearonElensar]

At 4/3/09 10:27 AM, CronoMan wrote: As for software, let the market decide, that's what it's there for

Then why complain about "those holding back progress" ;)

[VigilanteNighthawk]

At 4/3/09 10:27 AM, CronoMan wrote:

At 4/3/09 09:17 AM, DearonElensar wrote:

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote:

My requirements aren't that extensive, I'm saying that it would've been a shame if people didn't buy color tv's because they felt comfortable with monochrome screens. The more people that are willing to outgrow ancient methods and implementation, the more people will support those who actually try to broaden the horizon for development

And what if your color tv only allowed you to view stations owned by ted turner? As you realize in some part, MS is the one holding progress back, not us. There is the moonlight plugin, but until MS starts cross platform support for silverlight. It doesn't stand a chance in hell.

As for software, let the market decide, that's what it's there for
Silverlight hasn't got a chance to defeat flash as it is right now, even though I think that it indeed should replace flash, there are way too many that feel cross-platform is too important, so it won't happen until microsoft realises that they really are unable to compete with flash right now. No matter how much better silverlight is :P

I will admit. I've looked over the capabilities of sivlerlight vs flash, and yes, silverlight can do more. The problem is that cross platform isn't just a prefence. It's business decision. If I choose silverlight over flash for a client, I'm reducing the users that will be able to access those features, which in the end will cost the client money.

You can talk about the free market deciding, but the free market rarely decides on superiority alone. Flash has a decade head start on silverlight. By virtue of it's age, there is a great deal more support for it. Courses, tutorials, and components are available everywhere. Just about every video editor, even free ones, can export to the .flv format. There are a great deal more developers who are trained to develop with flash than silverlight. It's like php. It's not the best thing out there, but it's easy to employ, has a great deal of support, and it does the job it was designed to do. It's one of the dominant languages on the server even though it is ugly as hell.

One last thing: show me where I will productivity in Silverlight over flash for something that both can do. Better yet, provide some AS3 code. You admitted to me a while ago that you've never coded AS3, so how can you honestly compare it to Silverlight for tasks that both can accomplish? It may very well be possible that Flash can excel in terms of productivity for certain applications over silveright. Since you don't know actionscript, you aren't qualified to make that judgement. As I don't know silverlight or any .net languages, neither can I, but I'm not making that claim.

[thoughtpolice]

Why do people write C applications in VI / VIM on Unix? Are people purposely trying to keep progress back? What is the deal here?

As someone who uses vim to write C code on Linux, I find the assertion that I am 'trying to keep back progress' both ridiculous and inflammatory.

(I'm not saying C is the most uber-language there is - and don't even get me fucking started on editors - I just find this claim stupid.)

[CronoMan]

At 4/3/09 02:57 PM, VigilanteNighthawk wrote:

At 4/3/09 10:27 AM, CronoMan wrote:

At 4/3/09 09:17 AM, DearonElensar wrote:

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote:

My requirements aren't that extensive, I'm saying that it would've been a shame if people didn't buy color tv's because they felt comfortable with monochrome screens. The more people that are willing to outgrow ancient methods and implementation, the more people will support those who actually try to broaden the horizon for development

And what if your color tv only allowed you to view stations owned by ted turner? As you realize in some part, MS is the one holding progress back, not us.

well, that's a semi-valid point, I'll give you that :P If we just got rid of those pesky software

As for software, let the market decide, that's what it's there for
Silverlight hasn't got a chance to defeat flash as it is right now, even though I think that it indeed should replace flash, there are way too many that feel cross-platform is too important, so it won't happen until microsoft realises that they really are unable to compete with flash right now. No matter how much better silverlight is :P

I will admit. I've looked over the capabilities of sivlerlight vs flash, and yes, silverlight can do more. The problem is that cross platform isn't just a prefence. It's business decision. If I choose silverlight over flash for a client, I'm reducing the users that will be able to access those features, which in the end will cost the client money.

You can talk about the free market deciding, but the free market rarely decides on superiority alone. Flash has a decade head start on silverlight. By virtue of it's age, there is a great deal more support for it. Courses, tutorials, and components are available everywhere. Just about every video editor, even free ones, can export to the .flv format. There are a great deal more developers who are trained to develop with flash than silverlight. It's like php. It's not the best thing out there, but it's easy to employ, has a great deal of support, and it does the job it was designed to do. It's one of the dominant languages on the server even though it is ugly as hell.

Well, I'm not arguing against that :P I realise that silverlight has no chance in hell to succeed unless they make it cross-platform

One last thing: show me where I will productivity in Silverlight over flash for something that both can do. Better yet, provide some AS3 code. You admitted to me a while ago that you've never coded AS3, so how can you honestly compare it to Silverlight for tasks that both can accomplish? It may very well be possible that Flash can excel in terms of productivity for certain applications over silveright. Since you don't know actionscript, you aren't qualified to make that judgement. As I don't know silverlight or any .net languages, neither can I, but I'm not making that claim.

Honestly, I'm not an expert in either actionscript nor silverlight, all I know about it is what I've read from wikipedia, microsoft and adobe, but to me it seems that silverlight has gone through alot more planning than flash. Also silverlight is newer, so they have had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes flash has made

At 4/3/09 07:55 PM, thoughtpolice wrote:

Why do people write C applications in VI / VIM on Unix? Are people purposely trying to keep progress back? What is the deal here?

As someone who uses vim to write C code on Linux, I find the assertion that I am 'trying to keep back progress' both ridiculous and inflammatory.
(I'm not saying C is the most uber-language there is - and don't even get me fucking started on editors - I just find this claim stupid.)

Well, I'm pretty certain you're not trying to keep progress back, but my point is that I think it's a waste of time to use development tools that aren't up to date. Even if you don't realise it, you can make alot of awesome stuff alot easier if you try out

On my bachelor assignment, I was in a group with three other people, we were going to make ansolver for boolean algebra. Our teacher was a linux-nut so we had to write it so it for that platform. We started with VIM and GCC naturally, but after about a month, I said maybe we should do the development and debugging on windows and then compile it for linux afterwards, the teacher said "no fucking way", but we did it anyway (after I had spent some time convincing the other people in the group that it was a waste of time writing it on linux)
Then our productivity increased by like a 1000% because we no longer had to deal with stupid shit like makefiles and segmentation faults.

The more levels of abstraction you have, the less time you need to spend on petty details
and this is very important; the further away you get from hardware and bittwiddling, the better

For instance, take the human brain; it's split into millions of different "components" that gets abstracted through all these levels until you reach a conciousness, your conciousness doesn't have to deal with "stupid" things like heartbeats and regulating body temperature, that's nothing the higher abstraction layers should need worry about. When you utter a word, you shouldn't have to know where the word is located and then conciously need to move your jaw and tongue up and down to utter that word. Would it be possible for humans to talk without this level of abstraction?

Same goes for everything, the further away you are from going to the console and writing GCC -o3 -o outfile main.cpp dung.cpp etc.cpp the better, you should not need to spend any time at all on stuff like this, it's completely unnecessary. And if you say "you think that's hard?" that's not the point. I don't find double-pointers hard either, I just think it's stupid and a waste of time to have to manually allocate the memory space needed, because that is not the kind of things a developer should spend time on.
It's a lot like Direct3D vs. OpenGL as well, personally I think Direct3D is better than OpenGL, but each time I say something like that, people start muttering about what kind of a retard I am because I have an opinion about something most people have a preconcieved notion about that only takes multi-platform and performance into account. What about stuff like not needing to write basic functionality (some of it severily complex) like skeletal animation and textureloading.

Back to silverlight :
Let's think like we do in physics; ignore the wind-resistance, concentrate on the essentials
If we look past cross-platform (because silverlight just simply isn't cross-platform, yet), it's just simply put superior, that's my statement, and I'm sticking to it! :)

[CronoMan]

At 4/3/09 01:05 PM, DearonElensar wrote:

At 4/3/09 10:27 AM, CronoMan wrote: As for software, let the market decide, that's what it's there for

Then why complain about "those holding back progress" ;)

Most people are intelligent enough to look into new technology and new types of software architecture, but there's alot of people there who aren't "pitching in" in a sense, the more people who use state-of-the-art technology the faster it will progress. A fucking shitload of developers are sticking to that one thing they started with on their first job, no matter how stupid it is; PowerBuilder, MS Access, Delphi (yes I think delphi is stupid), PHP (hah!) or fucking Fortran and COBOL for that sake. These people are never joining on supporting the best of the best, but they are artificially keeping outdated inferior products alive, which leads to the average quality of software being less than optimal

These people aren't on the market, they're a part of the market, but they're not out there browsing

[kiwi-kiwi]

Why do people use vi / vim and C on UNIX?

I don;t really get this question.

If you are asking why they are not using windows and visual c++ or something more advanced, well it's because some people feel more comfortable using plain text to write code and then compile from CLI.

I know you are better off using an IDE but on the other hand if you can make programs this way, then you make programs whatever the circumstances.

If you are asking why are they using C, well, I hear that one quite often and there are quite a lot of reasons but there are two main reasons

Reason 1) It is FAST - Any addition to that makes it easier to code in high level languages translates in more assembler instructions in the resulting program. When you code on a platform with limited resources or when coding something that eats a lot of resources you are better off coding in C.

Reason 2)It gives access to low-level computer resources - Really when was the last time you used pointers in java?. This thing is really unsafe if you don't handle it the right way, but it is also faster and quite powerful. That is also why operating systems are written in C.

[Lashmush]

I dont really give a shit if my entire 3D project is reduced to a damn platformer with 3D elements (a la Castlevania: SotN and the GBA / DS titles) as long as it doesnt just lie down and die like so many other great ideas.

I'm sticking with Silverlight because I have this small, uncomfortable feeling that Microsoft is turning into a pretty decent company instead of the cockmunching faggots they used to be in the old Win95/98/ME days and back to DOS basically. This is a motherfucking investment, it might be a massive failure waiting to happen, but god damn it, take a fucking chance...

I mean, combine the Expression suite with the Visual Studio 2008 suite and you've struck programming gold in ALL DAMN AREAS... and if you throw in the Adobe Suite (if you can handle the apps decently) then your shit will look REALLY fine... you all do realize you can combine Flash and Silverlight as two separate entities on the same page, right? one sending commands to an outside webapp, right? its plausible at the very least... with for instance, MySQL which they apparently both support. Dont quote me on this, as im not that smart around Flash. I'm a Photoshop / Audition nerd at best when it comes to Adobes bullshit.

Anyway, this might be mah last forum entry ever, so I feel the need to add to this discussion the following:

Concerning VB, it was part of my schools education (srsly, I went to a High school between 2003 and 2006 and all they fucking taught me when it came to programming was VB which is useless on its own, and HTML + CSS which I allready knew more than they did about...)

And concerning Silverlight as my primary choice...

It's a hunch, basically. I just feel when I finger around with Expression Blend 2 that this shit is going to rock some seriously fucked up tits off the internet and webdesigners worldwide.

Say what you will, but since .NET 2.0 and later the 3.5 i needed for SL2 webapps... I've been a happy camper.

Now go code C# hacks for pornsites like the good whitehat programmers you are.

Or go get a bluebox and start haxxing some phones like oldschoolers.

Kthxbai, yall.

[Alphabit]

I don't think Silverlight will pick just yet; if it ever picks up, it'll take a while.

The main reason for this is that Silverlight is based on desktop languages and that causes several problems:
- A lot of web developers don't have strong Desktop-programming skills
- Desktop-based programming is less efficient (but more flexible) than scripting for the web - generally web scripters prefer efficiency over flexibility; face it there aren't that many things you need to do in a web environment just yet
- The development process of Silverlight isn't obvious to understand and Microsoft hasn't been very good at explaining it... I spent a few hours trying to learn it once and I wasn't too happy about how it worked; at first I couldn't figure out how to actually program in Expression Blend; then I realized that I had to import C# scripts and then they had a click-and-pick event handling thing where I could add scripts; it seemed really inflexible.

Obviously, the Silverlight player will be widely available after Microsoft decides to include it as part of their Windows Update (if they haven't already)... Or shipped with their next OS.
So the user aspect is covered.

To be honest, I think Flash is just too good to be brought down by anything.
Flash has been growing steadily for at least 10 years and Adobe are masters when it comes to web development; each new release of Flash is significantly better than the last one and they're not stopping; Adobe has already done some work on introducing hardware shaders in Flash which should make 3D much more accessible.

[Alphabit]

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote: Javascript is an abomination. If technology is to move forward, javascript needs to be annihilated.

What bothers me with so much web development is that nearly no languages has any datatypes for some odd reason. Why not? Are they intentionally trying to make it ineffective and insecure? Why can a number be read as a string and vice-versa? What is the purpose? Javascript has a shitload of bad design implementations and a faulty "semi" object orientation which somehow and for some reason doesn't really support objects, and some classes (not all, just some) can be accessed globally while others can't. You have classes defined that in later days makes no sense (navigator for one) because there has been no planning when they designed it, they just developed it just like the retards at PHP designs their product - step-by-step.

I see where you're going; Javascript can be quite messy when you have to accommodate for a variety of browsers that each have their own way of interpreting it.
I don't see what you have against Dynamic typing... I think it's perfect for the web and this is related to what I said in my earlier post about Desktop-languages being inefficient on a productivity basis.

I've used a LOT of different languages; both for the desktop and web and I can tell you that web languages are at least 3 times as efficient when it comes to getting the job done for several reasons:
- You do you not have to think about the types of variables you're using; you can do a whole lot of comparisons with unrelated types without having to type-cast anything; the interpreter knows what you mean
- When you write a function definition; you don't have to spend time thinking about all the types it'll accept; that time adds up...
- You don't need to PLAN your web apps as much; when I do a C project, I HAVE to plan-out everything so that I don't get myself to a point of no return; I met someone at my Uni who had to redo an entire project halfway-through because their program got so messy that they couldn't find their way around; this doesn't happen with web languages even if you don't plan.

All that being said, ActionScript is a pretty good example of an efficient program that can be statically typed; development process is a bit slower than when it was dynamically typed, but I think the performance improvements are worth it.

I don't see where the concept of type-safety fits into web programming; they don't have types; all operations are even more safe because all the type-casting is done automatically (and perfectly) by software. In summary; web languages minimize the errors in the development process at the expense of speed - and I think that makes a lot of sense.

[elbekko]

At 4/5/09 09:51 PM, Alphabit wrote: - You don't need to PLAN your web apps as much; when I do a C project, I HAVE to plan-out everything so that I don't get myself to a point of no return; I met someone at my Uni who had to redo an entire project halfway-through because their program got so messy that they couldn't find their way around; this doesn't happen with web languages even if you don't plan.

Then you haven't built a large web app yet :P
Believe me, you need a plan.

Goddamnretardedquotingrulecankissmyballs .

[CronoMan]

At 4/5/09 09:51 PM, Alphabit wrote:

At 4/3/09 04:17 AM, CronoMan wrote: Javascript is an abomination. If technology is to move forward, javascript needs to be annihilated.

What bothers me with so much web development is that nearly no languages has any datatypes for some odd reason. Why not? Are they intentionally trying to make it ineffective and insecure? Why can a number be read as a string and vice-versa? What is the purpose? Javascript has a shitload of bad design implementations and a faulty "semi" object orientation which somehow and for some reason doesn't really support objects, and some classes (not all, just some) can be accessed globally while others can't. You have classes defined that in later days makes no sense (navigator for one) because there has been no planning when they designed it, they just developed it just like the retards at PHP designs their product - step-by-step.

I see where you're going; Javascript can be quite messy when you have to accommodate for a variety of browsers that each have their own way of interpreting it.
I don't see what you have against Dynamic typing... I think it's perfect for the web and this is related to what I said in my earlier post about Desktop-languages being inefficient on a productivity basis.

I've used a LOT of different languages; both for the desktop and web and I can tell you that web languages are at least 3 times as efficient when it comes to getting the job done for several reasons:

I disagree; web hogties you and makes you its dirty little slutbitch-demon
In desktop development, there are no limits, and you can make very large applications very swiftly (depending on tool obviously)
In VB 6 you could make an entire large application in a matter of "minutes" without writing a single line of code; just drag and drop fields, buttons and shit over to a form, select data sources and actions, and press f5 to run. Performance was great (since all the code behind such a project was C++), appearance was customizable, the size of the executable was minimal, and you didn't need to do a single "workaround" for missing or shady implementations (which web is stuffed with (AJAX))

- You do you not have to think about the types of variables you're using; you can do a whole lot of comparisons with unrelated types without having to type-cast anything; the interpreter knows what you mean

Well it makes it easier, it also opens a whole new dimension of hard-to-debug bugs and security holes. Also it is very hard to make a proper IDE for them, because only the runtime really knows what kind of data is stored there (and even during runtime, the datatype might be open for interpretation)
So you'll probably never see a PHP or Javascript IDE where you can define objects, and then type -> or . and the IDE shows you all the methods and properties of that object, which saves a shitload of time. I remember "the good old days" where you had to memorize all the available functions of a library (or open a function reference), I don't want to go back there :P

- When you write a function definition; you don't have to spend time thinking about all the types it'll accept; that time adds up...

Thinking shouldn't be a bad thing ;)

- You don't need to PLAN your web apps as much; when I do a C project, I HAVE to plan-out everything so that I don't get myself to a point of no return; I met someone at my Uni who had to redo an entire project halfway-through because their program got so messy that they couldn't find their way around; this doesn't happen with web languages even if you don't plan.

All programs meant for production should be planned :P it's ok (and exciting) for some small personal project where you can just go ahead and put down what's on your mind right there and then, but if you want the application to be flexible and dynamic, you have to take all planned features and put it into perspective. Especially if you want the application to be extandable without having to alter any of the original source code

All that being said, ActionScript is a pretty good example of an efficient program that can be statically typed; development process is a bit slower than when it was dynamically typed, but I think the performance improvements are worth it.

I honestly see no legitimate reason for dynamic typing, I just think its generally a bad approach. Although I'm all for the highest level for abstraction possible, I don't really see a benefit of a language that naturally assumes that a cat can just as well turn out to be an elephant

Take a look at more complicated datatypes, like for instance date/time
How is it a good idea to represent such data dynamically? What happens to timezones, daylight savings time, different calendar types, and why should these types of data be representational (without directly casting or converting) as for instance a string or an integer? How do you know when a date is represented as unix-time and when is it represented as binary?
How do you make matrices properly in such a language? If its just a simple multidimensional array, combined with appropriate functions, you have so many pitfalls it stops being funny, even for me

I only see problems with dynamic typing, I see no real solutions to any problems other than imaginary ones

I don't see where the concept of type-safety fits into web programming; they don't have types; all operations are even more safe because all the type-casting is done automatically (and perfectly) by software. In summary; web languages minimize the errors in the development process at the expense of speed - and I think that makes a lot of sense.

Afaik, only JSP and ASP.NET of the web-languages have datatypes, and both of them show significant performance and security boosts compared to some of the more primitive competitors
I personally believe that statically typed variables have an inherent security benefit; you won't need to escape or quoteblock any integers. If someone tries to mess with the input, an runtime exception will be risen, instead of allowing an sql injection or otherwise scary data to be put in where it naturally shouldn't even logically fit