What do you think of Sun Microsystems' recently announced JavaFX Script for content creation? Is the world ready for yet another scripting language?

I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.

I think Sun is saying JavaFX is open source. I'm not sure if JavaFX Script is focused exclusively on Web development. I think it's just one function that can be done with it, and I'm not even sure if it does it that well at this point.

That might be true, and I think that HTML and CSS [are] focused on Web development. And I think that there are misconceptions going on from people who are pushing these alternative delivery platforms that somehow Web developers are hungry for richer and richer experiences, that they're really unhappy working with HTML and CSS. And that's just not true. We're not clamoring to re-create the desktop on the Web.

We don't need a new mousetrap?

No, we don't. HTML and CSS is actually a wonderful development environment, and a good number of computer scientists or people who have been around for a long time might consider them hacks or dirty or whatever, but they work.

But you do use those on Ruby on Rails?

Totally. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the key components of how you get Rails applications to a user. And I don't see that changing.

But not Ruby?

Ruby generates those things, so HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are delivery mechanisms.

Do you think Java is being displaced by scripting languages like Ruby or some of the others that are out there?

I think Java and C# and other languages of that type [are] definitely being replaced by leaner and lighter approaches. I think Ruby and Python and SmallTalk and other languages in that sphere [are] gaining rapid ground just by people realizing that they would much rather have an enjoyable, productive environment [rather than] buy into these arguments for safety or bad things that will come down if you don't have types and so on and so forth. So I'm absolutely seeing the market share of these languages going down as more and more people just realize that they didn't die by using [the] scripting languages.

What do you think of .Net and Windows development and Microsoft enabling its Common Language Runtime to run on the Macintosh platform?

In some ways I don't really care. I don't follow it very closely. The Microsoft ecosystem is not that interesting to me. It's a very different world from the world that I inhabit, which is one of open standards, open source, and so on and so forth. It's not to say that they don't do interesting stuff. I definitely do think that they have some interesting thoughts, [such as] LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which is very interesting. There's definitely a good number of things that the open-source world could learn from some of those initiatives, but wholesale jumping into the Microsoft boat has just never appealed to the kind of work I do.

Can Microsoft succeed with Silverlight, or are AJAX and Flash the major players for rich Internet application development as it relates to multimedia?

I think Microsoft can succeed selling Silverlight to people who already use Microsoft. If you're already using ASP.Net and other Microsoft techniques, that really in lot of ways were trying just to re-create the desktop online, then I totally think that these people will jump all over Silverlight. I do not think that people currently working in open source and with open standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are going to fall off their chairs in pursuit of adopting Silverlight.