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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion. Flash ( its runtime and the Dev Environment ), HyperCard, and arguably Visual Basic 6.0

These three in my opinion bring a lot of people into coding. I guess the word programming would be too prestige to be used to describe them and may anger those in Silicon Valley. But for the 99% of people out there, all they wanted was their computer somehow do what they tell them to do without being shown all these functional / object oriented programming and which programming language to fight for etc. People were even happy just coding a plug-in for World of Warcraft using Lua.

I still think the whole industry for computing has moved in the wrong direction.

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Those and Excel to a lesser extent. There are people who otherwise know nothing about coding who know enough about formulas and functions in Excel that they can make some pretty sophisticated calculators because the software gives them just enough of what they need without overloading them with the completedness of a full fledged programming language.

VB6 contributed heavily to my early coding education because, in the early days, I was more interested in merely being able to make a Windows program with buttons, checkboxes, and all the fancy widgets that were available. Visual Basic hands that to you on a silver platter and did so quite well.

Flash let visually oriented people dabble in programming.

Excel let numerically oriented people create mini dashboards and interactive calculators.

I recently discovered Glide Apps [0], which takes an spreadsheet-first approach to no-code app development, and it's totally changed how I understand programming concepts. I know HTML/CSS and just enough PHP for WP sites, and not much else. But seeing how data in Google Sheets visually populated specific field containers in my app UI got me looking into the Fetch API for JS, which allows me to do the same thing using JSON.

[0] glideapps.com/

There are still a ton of people learning how to make basic games using Processing or Python. Excel is also used a lot to automate things which can be a gateway to learning a more advanced programming language. Just people kids are learning in new ways doesn't mean they aren't learning.

I do concur that it's sad that a lot of modern games and applications have gotten less hackable which has removed a door that a lot of old school programmers used to learn how to code.

I started programming in Flash (after doing some basic html/css), and have later done some stuff in Processing as well. Flash was an infinitely better tool to get started with programming because it lets you actually draw and animate vector graphics, and then sprinkle in a tiny bit of code to make things interactive.

Compare that to Processing, where even just using some images drawn in some other tool is more difficult than it should be. I don't think you can really even compare the two in terms of beginner productivity.

In that case, I think Unity fits the hole that Flash used to fill. You can copy a bunch of free assets from the store (or build your own using blender) and then sprinkle in some code to make a game.

Right on the money.

These were popular and mixed visual metaphors (a drawing program in Flashs case) with programming.

Of course many things exist today, but they are all niche.

Flash was "art first" and it showed in how creative many of the things created were.

Today websites are primarily created by programmers and everything is all the more boring for it.

I am one of them. Started with ActionScript 2 and ended up with TypeScript.

Also, Flash IDE is one of the best vector graphics editors.

Speaking of which, do you use Scratch or similar to teach your kids programming?

I still distribute a visual basic 6 program that gets thousands of downloads a month

https://www.garyshood.com/rsclient/

I owe my entire career to Flash.

Me too, I was a vulnerability researcher =)

(Not really, but the joke wrote itself)

Unity fills the same kinda niche as flash and shockwave

Except Unity is much more complicated to learn and build in than Flash.

Have you tried before and is it really? I think most people just get get scared away without even trying because it sounds harder then it really is.

Making simple 2d games with unity is pretty easy. UE4/5 on the other hand is much harder to get started in, though it's also more customizable

Yes. I am actively learning Unity as a hobby.

I was a Flash developer back in the day.

Huge difference in learning curve.

Have you tried flash back in the day? It was almost as easy as drawing to make some games.

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