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Comment by jrwoodruff | Hacker News Reader

In my personal opinion, Flash was ruined by Adobe when they tried to 'fix' it (improve it?) with ActionScript 3, which followed the ECMA script standard. AS3 changed everything about how flash worked, and if you weren't a software engineer, the learning curve was steep. I actually went and took some basic programming classes (literally in visual basic lol) and learned how to write proper code.

Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and, for me, less fun.

And besides that, plenty of real coding tools already existed, and HTML/CSS/JS was improving really quickly as well. So I ended up learning those instead.

All of that was actually great for my design career, but Flash just didn't have a place anymore. And I'm still sad about that.

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> Not a bad thing, but once I learned some of those basics, I no longer had fun toying around with animations and creating, and instead spent my time writing classes and functions. It became a lot harder to 'hack' things together, and, for me, less fun.

I don’t disagree with that but I think it needs to be in the larger context of Adobe being bad at almost everything related to platform support. Their APIs were not well-considered; consistency happened at other companies; the tools were expensive, poorly designed, buggy, and basically unsupported (“The Flash IDE crashes when I do X”. 10 months pass. “Pay $800 for the upgrade and let us know if that fixes it ”), and performance/battery impacts always lagged behind the native alternatives — all of which sucked the fun out of the creative process as you had to take time away for pure drudgery working around Adobe’s slacking.

If at any time they’d invested 10% more on quality and basic software engineering they wouldn’t have had all of their customers looking for alternatives. As we saw, that can be more profitable for a short period but catches up hard.

AS3 was indeed a bad investiment given the direction ECMAScript ultimately went, but I do not believe for one second that it contributed to Flash's loss of popularity over time. Learning it after AS2 was easy and it was a much better language/platform to use, not to mention faster.

If anything I applaud Adobe by starting fresh instead of, say, accumulating warts in the language/VM the way Java did.

I actually quite liked the changes in AS3, and it being more programatic, I think it paved the way for what I do now.

After AS3, I remember switching to Flex, and basically using it like any current language. Although I absolutely hated the MXML syntax. I was pretty sad at the time, since AS3 was my main language, but looking back at it now, I think it was for the better.

I was a front-end developer during the AS2 -> AS3 -> Flex era. These days, I've been messing with Web Components (via LitElement) and the similarities with Flex/MXML are uncanny.

You're right, and it feels very similar to what we have in Vue/React these days. How are you liking Web Components?

I've enjoyed Web Components; using LitElement (a WC subclass) feels like writing React with native browser APIs. Working with the browser instead of hacking around it.

Good to hear, I was thinking about using Vue for a new project, but now decided to give Web Components (LitElement) a try. I didn't really need all the SPA functionality anyway, just wanted small and fast components.

Ping me on Twitter (@hunterloftis) if you have questions while working on your project. The community around WC/LitElement is small relative to Vue/React but amazingly responsive.

AS3 was literally the best thing that ever happened to Flash. The problems with Flash had nothing to do with the actual tech (aside from security) and everything to do with product management. It's just a shame that AS3 came so late in the Flash lifecycle.

This one got me in the feels man. Same.

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