Name game on SilverLight
Cruizer has a point, "SilverLight" really does sound like a play on "Flash". I never thought of it that way. I guess I'm losing my sense of fun. ~Groovy
Names aside, I think looking at SilverLight just from a "Flash" angle is missing the exciting stuff. I'm not too pumped up about having another "media player" or animation engine. (That is a topic for a different post)
What I'm really excited about is its support for dynamic languages. To think that they could shrink the .NET runtime to around 4MB and still have it support a lot of useful namespaces is amazing.
Looking at the VB Team's blog on SilverLight support for "VBx", the runtime would support some generic collections (List & Dictionary) and even LINQ over objects while still including most of the "well-loved" VB functions. I think they have really done well in shipping out a well-factored .NET framework including "Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll"
I'm not a VB guy and I'm experiencing "DLR envy" as I code in C#. So I'm really looking forward to IronRuby. I've never really played with IronPython (What about Boo?). Nothing against VB/Python, it's just personal preference and a personal sense of "nice code".