When I first started tinkering with algorithmic art, Java applets and Director was fast and spiffy but not many people installed the runtime and Shockwave. DHTML was a headache due to browser compatibility. C&#x2F;C++ with OpenGL were blazing fast but had no web presence (and was really really hard to learn at the time). Flash had the least amount of barriers to get me going and publishing.<p>I rode the flash train for a while and have since moved on. The awesome thing about flash was knowing that the stuff I learned is completely applicable to any programming language I chose to focus on.