For someone who likes to think of themselves as being at the forefront of web technology it astounds me you don't know much about one that is on 98% of machines connected to the internet.
Assuming there that you are trying to quote from Adobe's website? There are a couple of problems I have with that.
Firstly, they are not sampling machines, they sampled PC's only. Which means that they excluded all MACs, all slates, all hand-held devices.
Also, if you look at their data, it was compiled in July 2009, and only published 2010, this suggests that it was used as a timing function, rather than possible actual fact.
Also, they have used a minuscule sample size, and scaled to ginormous amounts. I do not believe their 3.5% error rate. For a start, at 3.5% of 98.7% (the claimed amount), that give 101.94% of PC users have flash installed. (HMMM)
The final problem, is that the survey gives a list of those machines/PCs which have installed flash, but not those that can use it. For the last year, 64bit OS's have primarily been sold, however, 64bit flash is still in beta mode. Meaning that the default web-browser won't see flash, or you have to use a 32bit browser (OK, so a 32bit browser means no real difference to most people).
I know there will be other tablets but I don't see arty types moving away from Apple.
And as apple seem unrelenting, that was why I questioned whether flash will survive.
I should probably re-phrased the question, will flash die for photographers portfolio sites?
There are various problems with flash, one of them being lazy people who program it. You can get bloated flash programs, and some which have memory leaks. This means that low-powered devices would be susceptible to these programs slowing them down, a good reason not to run them if you have the choice. If you have a choice of technologies which can perform the task you want to do, then a decision needs to be made as to which is most suitable. This should be a weigh-up between the number of people who can view/use it, and how easily it is to generate it.
If you can produce a portfolio site, using DHTML, then this might be the best bet.
because the code architecture is fundamentally flawed, or because of the people writing scripts inefficiently?
In my view, a mixture of the two. As an interpretive/JIT style platform, it cannot fully be optimised for the architectures that it has to run on.
Also, because it is easy to program, there are a lot of people who state that they are good programmers, but just throw them together. They have nice fast machines, and don't realise how bloated their programs are.
All these different scripts/codes languages, who made the code that enabled others to write these different codes? I mean i cant just open notepad and start inventing my own programming language from a base level can i?
The initial programs were written in machine code, by people who understand how the processors worked. Then came assemblers, which allowed people to write instructions to the processors, such as MOVWe memory from address 0x0001 to working memory, ADD 0x0030
An understanding of how the processor is functioning is useful for assembly, an assembler then compiles it into machine code for you.
Then in an assembly language, someone would write a compiler, which took more meaningful textual type language like C/fortran and convert it into an assembly/machine code for you.
You could easily write a new programming language using a C compiler, and notepad. For example, the GNU C compiler, is written in C and compiled now. The perl scripting language is written in C
