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Comment by ragona | Hacker News Reader

Major FB games were all AS3, which was a very standard language. If you’re familiar with C# or Java you’d be totally unsurprised.

In fact, Adobe hoped it would become the new JavaScript. The history of ECMA 4 was fascinating[1].

1: https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/

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AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.

In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing...

Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!

Apt that it was originally called Future Splash.

There is still no replacement tooling on the web, the way you can manage movie clips (as instances), attach animations, control the timeline.. (compose them)... That was really a joy.. Also was awesome the feedback loop within the ide (just hit ctrl+enter) to run it and try it. On these times, flash was also the predominant option for embedding video on websites.. (there are lot's of stories that are coming back to now: preloading, lazy loading, easing... (I still follow Robert Penner for they ease equations). Thought people still uses tweenlite ;)

Ha hey, Greensock was and was and is the best, and it’s still going strong for Js. Frankly we could probably get half the experience of flash if we all just went and worked with that library!

They were! We had much better build and art pipelines than many of the PC games I’ve worked on. And the metrics data tracking and ugly anti user behavioral stuff was years ahead of itself.

> AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.

That's a bit jumbled. AS3 was an early implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition spec - Macromedia/Adobe implemented it expecting that the same changes would soon be coming to standard JS. ECMA later wound up abandoning that spec (for reasons unrelated to Flash), leaving AS3 sort of stranded as its own separate language.

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