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Comment by nascentone | Hacker News Reader

"Just keep making awesome things with whatever tools you have at your disposal."

This is what's depressing, though. I want to make awesome things, but HTML is simply an inferior and more restrictive platform than Flash. The thought of programming in Javascript instead of ActionScript 3 is soul-crushing. Javascript is basically ActionScript 1.0 (which I thought I migrated from years ago) without the cross browser consistency and more advanced graphical APIs.

Long live the internet, but losing Flash is a bad thing for the internet. It's not Flash that needs to die, it's the entire archaic and poor sighted standards stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript and the horrible plain file HTTP delivery system) in favor of a new standard stack that can actually do something close to the Flash Player.

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I agree that Javascript isn't as mature as Actionscript 3 feels, but would you really choose to build a website or web application in Flash over Javascript even if it meant a poorer user experience for your users?

Your users don't care about your opinion of Javascript's syntax.

More focus on Javascript and the tools available will only help improve the language faster, and I believe Flash has already made a huge impact (good!) on the Javascript language.

Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?

As far as I know Javascript (EMCA script) is older than Actionscript , so if actionscript feels more 'mature' despite being younger and only developed by one company doesn't that tell you that there's something wrong with the Javascript as a whole?

I agree though that it would be awesome if adobe created a suite of Javascript products that focused on developing creative content in a similar way to what flash did.

I think the reasons most people hate flash are that the platform itself works poorly on anything other than windows , this could be fixed in part by Adobe simply open sourcing the flash VM.

The other reason is that lots of flash developers used the platform to create crap like flash intros and obnoxious advertising , that won't exactly go away with HTML5/JS.

I like your optimism about Javascript's future, but I think it's a bit naive. Even if Javascript was AS3 today, we would still have to deal with a lack of cross browser consistency, the ancient text document oriented DOM, a lack of the same powerful graphical APIs found in Flash, and the lack of a standard top level object oriented structure (as found in the Flash platform with MXML, SWFs, SWCs, symbol and timeline architecture, etc.)

I'm not just hoping I'm counting on Adobe or someone delivering a good Javascript IDE that mimics OOP design, and I'm keeping an eye on Google's Dart project, but even after that I'm not expecting the experience to be nearly as smooth or creatively liberating as Flash.

One of the biggest advantages of flash was that beyond a few DOM wrangling capabilities it basically threw away the rest of the browser and was really more akin to a Java applet than being part of the browser.

This meant that even somebody using IE6 can have a good experience with a flash app, assuming their flash is upto date.

What annoys me with HTML5/JS apps is I constantly see people showing off demos of something cool they did with the "open" HTML5/JS tools. Then I load their demo and it's all like "hey, sorry your not using the latest version of Chrome come back when you've installed it"

Hopefully this will get better over time , but you've still got IE dragging it's feet and doing things a bit differently + Microsoft's habit of dropping support for new versions in older OSes.

Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation otherwise I can see this becoming a nightmare and everyone having to keep multiple versions of multiple browsers installed just to run all the apps they need.

Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation

Heh, this would be an ideal situation, but good luck trying to get them to agree on that. The browser wars are not over yet, who knows if they ever will be.

We thought that the Web would be that final platform that would give us the ability to write our app once, and then make it available instantly on all operating systems. Well, technically, we got that. Except now we have to worry about browser incompatibilities. We didn't solve the problem of cross-platform compatibility. We just have a different set of platforms today.

What wee need is a language that will do for web development what Java has done for development in general in 90s - something that will allow us to write our apps once, and have them display perfectly on all major browsers. But seeing that this magical language would probably also need to support arcane versions of various browsers I don't see that happening any time soon.

> What wee need is a language that will do for web development what Java has done for development in general in 90s - something that will allow us to write our apps once, and have them display perfectly on all major browsers.

I thought we did have that and it was called gasp Java!

Yeah, but applets never really took off, for numerous reasons. One of them being that you needed to have a Java browser plug-in installed in order for them to work. This new language I'm talking about would either need to be understood natively by browsers or it would need to compile the code to something that the browsers would understand and be able to display natively (without any additional plug-ins). At the moment, that's HTML+JavaScript, but if browser vendors could agree on some other, common language that would be supported consistently across all browsers and that would provide a richer experience, that would be an ideal situation. Don't forget that the purpose of HTML was never to give us the ability to create applications, it was to display documents, which were the basis of the early web. However, now we need something that will allow us to create rich web apps that have a consistent look & feel and functionality across all browsers without the need to write additional code to cover all the quirks of specific browsers. Maybe something like Flash, but that's open, understood natively and works equally good across all browsers and operating systems. But that, of course, is just wishful thinking.

Mxml is a development tool, you could compile it down to html and css with a javascript api. Look at extjs. It provides a crossbrowser OO flexlike api on top of the DOM. Javascript is good enough as a target language for a compiler. I expect adobe to keep the dev tools but change the output to be pluginfree.

Yes there's a lot that a company could do fake a good OOP architecture which compiles down to standards soup, but such solutions tend to result in tons of extra generated crap. Dart compiles to JS... with a a simple "Hello World" app coming out as 17,000 lines of code!

Plus not having the structure as part of the standard will make iterative development a nightmare. Instead of being reliant on a proprietary runtime (like Flash Player) we are reliant on proprietary compilers and libraries. How is that better?

I think you're right on all counts here. A big issue I see is that the General Flash Hatred causes people to not acknowledge that there are places where Flash is clearly superior for the users' experience.

> Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?

That would be welcomed with open arms. But why not continue to use Flash until this comes around, instead of slowly killing it without a decent replacement?

Though I never used Flash professionally, it has been the most fun to use for games and any other side projects that involve some sort of visual control. JavaScript isn't even close yet.

Well, I have been using Adobe Dreamweaver as a fancy text editor for coding Javascript, but I hesitate to call it a great one. I suspect what you are looking for is a great jQuery/jQuery UI editor (i.e. a rich interface framework) that also happens to support javascript.

Agreed. Javascript is a horrible language compared to as3, and a disastrous platform compared to flash. I cringe everytime I have to write some javascript, even if I'm using jQuery and the only browser it will ever be run on is Chrome.

What would really be cool is if you could target VM's using whatever language you want (including statically typed languages like Java and AS3. The JVM and AVM did it, so I don't see why V8/etc can't). Javascript should not have a monopoly on the VM.

Have you seen haxe? (http://haxe.org/doc/intro) I don't have any experience with it, but it seems like you might like the idea. Statically typed language that can be exported into either JS or AS3.

Yeah, haXe is cool. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not first class native support.

Deleted comment

[Context: the deleted comment suggested we don't know Javascript because we were "moaning about using it" and we should "learn Javascript before knocking it"]

I know Javascript, your comment suggests you don't know ActionScript's history: AS1 was an ECMASscript language just like JS, so to that end it was actually literally the same language as JS running in a different environment with a different API. The latest iteration of JS has hardly changed since then, whereas AS1 evolved into AS2 then AS3, which is now a much more advanced OOP language, and it's still evolving. Going from AS3 to JS is literally like going backwards in time.

If memory serves AS2 was supposed to be more or less the same as ecmascript 4. The problem is ecmascript 4 never made it out of committee. With the reboot in the ecmascript committee that produced the harmony release, we're now on the road to get optional strict typing. For me the typing is the only thing really missing from javascript.

You can get quite far on the way to strict typing with a good IDE like jetbrains. It has very thorough 'compile time' checks (while editing). I almost don't miss strict typing when writing large pieces of javascript in jetbrains.

I've never, not even once, missed static typing since accepting the move to JavaScript; you just get used to it. You shouldn't rely on the compiler to detect 'errors', rely on your test cases.

Did AS1 have closures? I was under the impression that it didn't, which makes it a very different language from JavaScript, even if the syntax looks similar.

Saying they are "very different" because of closures is hyperbolic, but at any rate, yes, AS1 had closures like JS.

Can you provide a syntax example? I couldn't find any documentation/sample code of AS1 closures.

And to be clear, I am moaning about the language AND the DOM, but I would likely moan less if not for the DOM and the multiple interpretations of the language.

I believe Google's engineers tend to agree with the JavaScript part of your argument http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/dart-googles-progra...

Example: Remember JavaScript crypto and it's problems? As it happens, Flash 11 added a new secure random number generator for crypto.

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