Comment by zacharypinter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zacharypinter | Hacker News Reader

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> I've been a stalwart Flash developer for 15 years, so nothing bothers me more than greatly exaggerated reports of Flash's premature demise.

...

> I've learned my lesson -- whatever my next platform is, no-one should be able to take it away from me.

There's an interesting side discussion here. It seems to me that the rate of substantial changes in technology/frameworks/ui design/etc is increasing such that the expectation of finding a platform that you can hold on to for 15 years is becoming untenable.

I worked with Flash (via Flex) for several years and found it to be one of the best UI frameworks I've ever developed with. I have yet to find an web framework that matches the productivity of MXML and databinding for standard sorts of UI's.

I also use emacs daily, which is a piece of software that's older than I am and still going strong.

That said, when it comes to staying on top of technology rather than being made obsolete by it, I have yet to find a better strategy than to try to "ride the wave".

HTML5 addresses a lot of cross-platform issues and has a lot of attention today so it's worth learning, but I don't expect what I learn today to last forever. If/when VR takes off, we might all be focusing on 3D frameworks and a wealth of new UI primitives to support that ecosystem. Or, maybe some other technology will take the dev community by storm and it'll be worth going that direction.

In short: moving with the major paradigm shifts seems more tenable than trying to find/predict the stack that will last the longest. Very curious to hear if others have similar or alternative thoughts.

Flash did what any other technology is still unable to do (maybe with the exception of java)- offer a true cross platform solution. Look at webrtc. Its been over a year now since the hype and we still don't have support in half the browsers. Till date no technology does audio/video chat as well as Flash.

open platforms are a long term investment.

> finding a platform that you can hold on to for 15 years is becoming untenable.

I would think so. It only became clear that Ruby would be viable for jobs about 7-8 years ago. It is used absolutely all over the place right now, true. But it is going to be competing against Google's V8 pretty much directly, and that, well that is not winnable.

Adobe Flash has been around for so long that Wikipedia doesn't mention when. I remember flash on even the first web enabled computers. Everyone had it so they could play games on Newgrounds.

That is such an exceedingly long time ago, I don't feel like OP has very much to complain about.

I remember it back in 1996 when it was called "future splash". the first major website to use it was simpsons.com, with the major selling point that the drawings could be done with vectors and thus be quicker to download than hefty GIFs or JPGs. it was "just" a vector image format. Nothing about apps or interactivity.

People (especially flash devs) give HTML5 a lot of flack now for not being a "real" "viable" platform, but those same people don't seem to remember flash used to get a lot of the very same kind of flack for not being as powerful as java applets.

and java applets used to get the same flack for not being as powerful or fast as native apps.

In the grand scheme of things, flash and java didn't take that long to gain wide acceptance as serious platforms for real apps. People find it comical now that we're doing things now in HTML5 that we could do 10 years ago in flash or java, without remembering you could do it 20 or 30 years ago on the metal. Progress is sometimes making these things more broadly accessible, instead of just more "impressive" or "serious" from a technical standpoint. And that's still an important and valuable kind of progress that should not be so easily discounted! Yeah html5 is not as impressive now as flash is now, but it's open, free, and it could do the things flash could do when it started to get taken seriously. we can see the course of history from this point forward because we've been here before. Multiple times.

When I was doing professional web cartoons in Flash in 2000, Macromedia's general response to our complaints like "The editor falls over and dies on big files" was "it's not for that, it's for making little interactive thingies".

Fast forward a few years and there are network TV cartoons being done with Flash. Though it's a hell of a lot easier when you can render out video and stick it together instead of trying to put everything into one SWF for delivery over a 19.2k modem.

I have yet to find a better strategy than to try to "ride the wave".

My strategy also. I'm in my mid forties now and have always seen the language/platform as a way to exercise my development skills. Like many things the trick is timing, when to sit up and take serious notice of a new language/platform.

Kind of the entire point of Haxe is that you don't have to find/predict the stack that will last the longest, because whenever the hot new thing emerges... you just add a new Haxe target for it.

i don't think the language is what matters most when talking about technology. The platform is the important thing. When coding on iOS or Android, learning Objective-C or Java isn't the longest thing to learn. Learning the framework objects and patterns is really what matters. Same goes for HTML5, node, Ruby on Rails, etc... A computer language is very rarely using more than 50 language constructs (operators + keywords), which could easily be learned in less than a few days.

Haxe doesn't solve this issue i think (and nothing can).

It's maybe a bit more polite to say: Flash is not dead, it now compiles to multiple targets :)

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