Sounds a lot like pressure from Silverlight's DLR allowance for multiple languages, doesn't it?
If so, this is a good example of competition "waking-up" age-old platforms (like Flash).
If so, this is a good example of competition "waking-up" age-old platforms (like Flash).
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/12200
Then, two years later, they announced that the Flex SDK would be free and eventually open source:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/26/14024...
...which was within a month after Microsoft released Silverlight.
which, even for people like me who drink the interpreted-languages-are-fast-enough koolaid, seems like a lot of levels of indirection :) i think the CLR approach seems a little more straightforward: "native" interpreters that compile e.g. python->the CLR IL (instead of python->interpreter c source->llvm->actionscript).
and i doubt you could just take e.g. the python interpreter and throw it into a SWF -- certainly pieces of the interpreter along with C modules that interact with the filesystem, etc. would need to be tweaked to deal with the AIR runtime.
cool idea though, and they even got quake 1 (!) running in a SWF (see the video below in this thread... wild stuff)