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Comment by redman25 | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, why are people bashing Actionscript? The language itself is based on Javascript and Javascript isn't getting so much hate. I know everyone hates Flash now... maybe I just still have a soft spot in my heart for programming Flash-based games back in the day.

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I marked dislike on Actionscript because of AS3. Actionscript is basically Javascript, but with Actionscript 3 they added type annotations for static typing features. IMO, it did not fit in well with the language, and the integration between the two worlds (static vs dynamic typing) was poorly handled.

1/ Because it's at the top of the list and people are more likely to cast a vote

2/ Because most people (myself included) don't know actionscript but think Actionscript == Flash and downvote based on that.

There needs to be some way to differentiate people that hate a language for some external reason (anti-MS, anti-Apple, anti-Flash) or those who hate it from having used it. I suspect Java has more dislikes from actual users, where Actionscript and Perl get their dislikes from people who have never gone full time in either language.

Based on the numbers that I see, JavaScript is disliked more than ActionScript. When you take into account people's general dislike for anything flash related and how few people know anything about the language I think it did ok. What would be interesting would be to see a poll of the different versions of ECMAScript proposals and see what the public thinks of the real language differences between each. Classes are coming and structs are proposed and many of the things that ActionScript has had for a while are also leaking into JavaScript like rest arguments, and proxy objects. Overall I think ES6 is clearer and more flexible and I'm cool with omitting types unless you are doing things like types arrays and so on. ActionScript will go away over time and over time JavaScript environments will catch up even if they are still way behind in many respects today.

Classes without any kind of type checking are worthless imho. I would have prefered implicit interfaces instead of classes.

> Based on the numbers that I see, JavaScript is disliked more than ActionScript

Not now: AS has an 84% dislike rate to JS' 39%.

Actionscript has basically no error checking. It'll check for syntax errors and that about it - every other error manifests as a strange bug or "why the F* is nothing happening!?!" Then you spend an hour tracking it down and discover the cause was some trivial thing that any normal language would have simply raised a compiler error for in the first place.

And on top of that, its libs are very callback-heavy even in places where a synchronous option should have been available, so even very basic sequential code sometimes gets turned into a messy chain of callbacks.

That's why I made a beeline for the "ActionScript - Dislike" button.

Are you serious? When's the last time you used ActionScript, 2004? Modern AS3 compiled using the FlexSDK is a proper development environment with compile-time errors for types and all. Combined with a debug player, you get both compile-time and runtime errors.

It certainly has a hell of a lot more error checking going on than something like JavaScript by the virtue of being a statically typed language first with dynamic stuff second.

That's not to say that obscure bugs don't exist in the runtime as with every other runtime ever, but don't misrepresent something you don't seem to be well versed in.

The same reason everyone was down on Javascript 10 years ago: The development tools, APIs, and runtime were unpleasant. Unfortunately for flash developers it doesn't look actionscript will be following in Javascript's footsteps.

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