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Learning to program can be a challenging task but it can be made a whole lot easier if the language supports it. All you are doing is providing instructions that a computer can execute. It's what I do for a living. I also write about C, C++ and C#- three programming languages  on About.com- the New York Times owned website but that's by the by. 

Flash is probably the main language for doing interactive graphics but it's not the only one- processing is another. In their words "Processing is an open source programming language and environment for
people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by
students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for
learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals
of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software
sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by
artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in
the same domain." (By which they mean Flash of course!)

You can even write programs to run on mobile phones.  It's a little bit techy getting Processing up and running- I suggest you find someone techy to do this but after that, programming in Processing is pretty easy. Being Open source means that really techy people can look at the code that drives processing and change it. I noticed that this is such an ongoing process that the most recent changes were put back less than 30 minutes ago!  

When you see what you can write in Processing- look at the samples, it's definitely worth the slight learning curve to have a go. 

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