Why should a language that is not the *best choice* for everything be the *best language*?

Suppose you have a very tight budget and little time and need to design an algorithm that must be correct or else you will incur in a grave penalty: C++ would be a very poor choice, and Haskell might probably be a better idea. Need to build a simple invoice management application for a hairdresser for 1500$? Go with Java or C#. Need to build an indie game to sell on Steam, the XBox and the iPad? Again, go with C# and XNA/Unity/MonoTouch.

The *best language* does not exist. The *best language for the job* does exist, and it is not just one.

...choose the tool that's best for the job, don't choose the job that's best for the tools you know already.

Game developers, for instance, are among the guys who write the most performance sensitive code out there, and they use a mix of C, C++, C#, Lua/Python for the various parts of the game. Usually the inner, tight loop is written in C/C++, higher level modules are written in C# and designer/modder scripts are written in a very high level language such as Lua. There is no best language in general, and whoever says otherwise is often an idiot.

Computer scientists? I'm a programming languages guy, type systems and declarative/functional programming. I hardly see myself as an engineer and I've never published at an engineering conference...

As a university researcher in applied game development I pretty much work on abstracting and generalizing *finished* software.

I usually do this: I spend between six months and a year building a game according to some technique, framework or new language I am researching. The game is then finished, published and even sold. Then a paper is written describing the technique and its inpact. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is just anecdotical experience, but in this day and age of shrinking research budgets it is not uncommon to find scientists who also package and sell their research.

So this whole "programmers are cool, they develop finished stuff while the other a-hole scientists quit halfway" is just a stupid generalization based on a superficial stereotype of academia. Also, THIS IS NOT NEWS, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.

Ok, I get it now.

Thanks for the explanation.

...it's only advantage is being Open?

I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...

And no malware has ever been transmitted through the browser, so another problem brilliantly solved!

Now if only we could remove the OS and only have a browser that does exactly what the OS did but under a different name, the world would be a far better place...

I can render a PDF perfectly on all OSes I own (Windows, OS X, iOS, Windows Phone 7) already!

Where the fuck did anybody officially say they dropped support for Silverlight?

So, Microsoft has changed one of its websites from Silverlight to HTML 5. That's a standard, so it's always A Good Thing.

Silverlight remains there, a good way to build animated user experiences; Silverlight 5 will be integrated with XNA. Having the chance to push a reduced version of my game (I am a game developer, and I can assure you this is VERY IMPORTANT TO MY COMPANY) through the browser as a demo/for betas, etc. is great. Easily deploying an application with a complex logic (nope: a dynamically typed language such as Javascript is worse than C# for complex reasoning) to many users through the browser with the possibility of right-clicking it to install it offline is another Good Thing.

So from where I sit Microsoft has done a good job because HTML 5 is better for that kind of website, and Silverlight is very alive even though it will be reduced to the only thing it was successful at: medium/large applications that must be easily deployed.

The fact that many books will be supplanted by digital versions is obvious and is already happening at a very fast pace. The idea that this trend will continue linearly is very dumb. There are applications for paper books, be it because you want the object for your physical collection, be it for taking notes or be it because a prestigious conference wants to print its proceedings.

We will probably end up in a world where most "perishable" low-cost/read-once books exist only in digital because they are not interesting enough that anybody may care about printing them, where high-value publications, proceedings, etc. will remain on paper because the value of the medium is by far surpassed by the value of the contents and a hard copy still makes a lot of sense.

You often see this kind of asinine ideas that trends will never stop when some equilibrium will be reached: smartphones and tablets are growing, therefore the PC is going to die soon, etc. Wake up: new and old find ways to live together, and a successful innovation does not necessarily displace everything that was before it...

In my book you need some studying to do if you think .Net (one of the major managed runtimes of today) is a language.

Plato was Greek, so I doubt he wrote originals in Latin :)

Win 7 infections went from 3/1000 to 4/1000, that is infected ratio went from 0.3% to 0.4% (yes, it is a 33% increase, to be precise), while XP went from 18/1000 to 14/1000, that is infected ratio went from 1.8% to 1.4%. The numbers actually mean that Microsoft is doing a good job on security, since over 1000 PC the combined metric is not an increase of 11% (as the article seems to imply) but rather we went from 2.1% infected to 1.8%, which is a nice step.

It's just a very cheap way to make my users try a full, free (ad-supported), on-demand version of my game by using the same assets of the Desktop/Windows and Xbox versions. Also, I can let paying users access the SL out of browser system to let them install the application and use it offline, without even having to build an installer package. Development time is very costly for an indie team, and for us this is already making a large difference, especially given how happy our publisher is about this opportunity...

Honestly I don't get the point of your snarkiness about my humour...

Mostly I do the following: I write reusable meta-libraries in F# that generate the same code-behind that others would repeatedly build by hand in Visual Studio with C#. So I clearly hear what you are saying, but rather than conclude negatively that an easy-peasy avenue makes a library "dumb", I appreciate the fact that the underlying model is clean enough to allow both library makers and "regular coders" to be productive. More often than not you find libraries that are good for idiots but are rather poor representations of whatever they wish to represent, other times you find libraries which are pure shit, and rarely you find stuff which is clean and elegant but which arguably has no possible practical use (http://www.haskell.org/arrows/ :D)