If Flash is open sourced then either nobody will touch the code (so not needed for "preserving", only for educational purposes), or it will be adapted and ported. For preservation, just keeping copies of the (offline) Flash installer and the natural habitat/environment (Windows XP,...) around and some kind of VM software (VirtualBox) would be better in my opinion. Just like we can preserve NES games by just keeping the ROM files, the games are not gone because there's no access to source code. And if there's really big demand for it, people can always reverse engineer it (as has been done with some NES games). Old games that have their source available will get other contributions (e.g. EDuke32 and the high resolution pack changes Duke Nukem 3D to higher fidelity, but it's not preserving the original way the game was back in the day).
So preserving (in its pristine form) is one thing, open sourcing and trying to evolve it is another. In my opinion, Flash shouldn't be evolved. But Flash should be preserved in its pristine form, so we can watch Homestar Runner cartoons even a few years down the road in a Windows XP VirtualBox (or whatever virtualization software happens to be the thing of the day then).
Agree. Code should not fail to run because of programmer errors that are not visible in the text editor - i.e. a stray tab instead of spaces.
If you have wrongly-balanced curly-brace code (or missing curly braces since you expect it to be only one statement), it's just as likely to fail compiling or do something you didn't expect (think Apple SSL "goto fail"). Space-/indentation-based block definitions and curly braces are as powerful, any proper editor will help you indent your code.
The advantage of indentation-based blocks IMHO is that it results in some consistency (no "holy wars" where to place the opening/closing brace and if/when to leave out braches, etc..) and easier readability.
In practice, "a stray tab instead of spaces" is a non-issue, Python will fail loudly and you fix your editor settings, done.
It's also a nightmare copying code snippets, especially from the web - you might as well retype them by the time you've fixed the tab vs. space issues.
Most of my coding time isn't spent copy'n'paste-ing code from the web. Readability matters more, since most time is spent reading code. Adapting the code from the web to your own environment by having go to through it might very well be a good thing.
If you copy'n'paste C/C++/JavaScript/Java code from the web, you also want to fix the indentation of the pasted code since it's probably in a different style than what current project you're working on.
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If Flash is open sourced then either nobody will touch the code (so not needed for "preserving", only for educational purposes), or it will be adapted and ported. For preservation, just keeping copies of the (offline) Flash installer and the natural habitat/environment (Windows XP, ...) around and some kind of VM software (VirtualBox) would be better in my opinion. Just like we can preserve NES games by just keeping the ROM files, the games are not gone because there's no access to source code. And if there's really big demand for it, people can always reverse engineer it (as has been done with some NES games). Old games that have their source available will get other contributions (e.g. EDuke32 and the high resolution pack changes Duke Nukem 3D to higher fidelity, but it's not preserving the original way the game was back in the day).
So preserving (in its pristine form) is one thing, open sourcing and trying to evolve it is another. In my opinion, Flash shouldn't be evolved. But Flash should be preserved in its pristine form, so we can watch Homestar Runner cartoons even a few years down the road in a Windows XP VirtualBox (or whatever virtualization software happens to be the thing of the day then).
Agree. Code should not fail to run because of programmer errors that are not visible in the text editor - i.e. a stray tab instead of spaces.
If you have wrongly-balanced curly-brace code (or missing curly braces since you expect it to be only one statement), it's just as likely to fail compiling or do something you didn't expect (think Apple SSL "goto fail"). Space-/indentation-based block definitions and curly braces are as powerful, any proper editor will help you indent your code. The advantage of indentation-based blocks IMHO is that it results in some consistency (no "holy wars" where to place the opening/closing brace and if/when to leave out braches, etc..) and easier readability. In practice, "a stray tab instead of spaces" is a non-issue, Python will fail loudly and you fix your editor settings, done.
It's also a nightmare copying code snippets, especially from the web - you might as well retype them by the time you've fixed the tab vs. space issues.
Most of my coding time isn't spent copy'n'paste-ing code from the web. Readability matters more, since most time is spent reading code. Adapting the code from the web to your own environment by having go to through it might very well be a good thing. If you copy'n'paste C/C++/JavaScript/Java code from the web, you also want to fix the indentation of the pasted code since it's probably in a different style than what current project you're working on.