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Comment by trekky1700 | Hacker News Reader

My biggest surprise is that nobody did something like this sooner. Especially how distracting it is when someone in a movie is controlling a weapons system or saving the world with code written in ActionScript.

Unless ActionScript somehow becomes the dominant programming language of the future, in which case the future looks darker than I thought.

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I just saw a post on another site where someone did something similar with Chess:

http://imgur.com/a/dVgI4

He said he already has a lot of requests, so I can assume he'll probably do something similar.

I'm pretty sure that this will have been done in the many years of newsgroups, IRC, SomethingAwful, 4chan, HN, reddit and random tripod/angelfire/geocities sites.

This guy was the first one to be mainstream. It's like the MP3 player: Jobs had the audacity to say that Apple basically invented the MP3 player because their MP3 player was the best, not because it was the first. Same story with the iPhone. It wasn't the first touchscreen cellular phone, but it was the best. When a product is the best in class, it gets noticed. This was surely the lesson Jobs learned from Microsoft's success: don't worry about being the first, just worry about being the best or, at least, the loudest.

And in this digital age, that's actually fine. If we valued people only because they had ideas first, nothing would actually be done about it and inventions would not be successful because half of the inventors would keep their creations tailored to their preferences rather than extending a generalised product that caters to everybody.

I know it is a little off-topic. But what is so bad about ActionScript?

Nothing, when assuming it's being used for an appropriate use case. In the previously mentioned use cases it's likely the wrong tool for the tasks in question.

I personally feel like AS3 is a less-dynamic version of Java. Making a statically typed language less dynamic than Java does not impress me.

(I know that you can write in the more dynamic Javascript style w/o type markers, but the integration between those two worlds in AS3 is very poor)

Nothing in particular, it is very similar to other languages like Java, I just wouldn't recommend it for saving the world. Unless the world is being attacked by Flash game loving aliens.

At the point where I'm fighting aliens in a metal suit with a super compact free energy source strapped to my chest, I think the runtime performance characteristics of the software involved is the least of my concerns.

Nothing. It doesn't seem all that different from JS to me. I think people just dislike the IDEs.

ActionScript 2.0 was very much like JavaScript, as it specifically attempted to be ECMAScript compatible. There were some dialect differences, but they were essentially the same language with different APIs (Flash API vs browser DOM).

ActionScript 3.0 added optional static typing and classes and efficient binary blob handling and other features and at one point was going to serve as the basis for ECMAScript 4.0 via the Mozilla Tamrin project (so ActionScript would have actually been modern JavaScript) but this was killed (primarily by Microsoft and Yahoo) for political reasons.

AS3.0 was actually a pretty nice language and I would have loved to see it replace JavaScript back then as the usable set of JavaScript features is still quite a bit behind where ECMAScript4 would have brought it years ago.

How interesting, thanks for your insight. I'll have to play with it sometime.

I remember there was a poll on HN with a huge majority vote against AS; perhaps people confuse it with ActiveX and that's why they seem to dislike it so much.

I think most of that is just misdirected Flash hate. Having worked with the source code to the Flash player, I understand better than most why Flash was hated, but ActionScript wasn't bad (especially at 3.0), and the Flex framework for ActionScript had a lot of really sweet features like two-way binding with smart property re-evaluation that are just now becoming common in JavaScript via frameworks (though it also had some horrible stuff as well, not all roses).

You may want to check out the haxe language as it borrows quite a lot from ActionScript 3 with tools that allow you to compile your haxe code down to JavaScript, AVM1 (AS2), AVM2 (AS3), C/C++, etc, and while it is a relatively niche language it is a lot more "alive" than ActionScript 3 currently is.

> Unless ActionScript somehow becomes the dominant programming language of the future, in which case the future looks darker than I thought.

Agreed, but I am ready for the call from Mr. Stark.

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