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Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The

Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types; type inference was non existant, Vector was invariant, etc. Let's face it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design. Typescript is today so much better than AS3 ever was.

tomc1985 9y ago
To say nothing of their ridiculous security sandbox design... I remember trying to make banner ads with dynamic price data and between all the various detached hosting abstractions and ActionScript's security requirements (in a time before this kind of setup was common) it was a hell of a project.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.
- nojvek 9y ago
  When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better. Now it can die happily.
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
    You should look at C# in .NET core as well. C# was designed by the same guy as Typescript and Delphi, the famous language designer Anders Hejlsberg. His languages are the most logical and elegant I have used, all truly pleasant to work with. Building a decent language that compiles down so cleanly to Javascript is a minor miracle.
  - rpwverheij 9y ago
    exactly, loving the typing of AS3, typescript is what made me switch over to reimplementing everything in javascript.
- penpapersw 9y ago
  I tried TypeScript yesterday and while I really love the language, the tooling was wayyyy too complicated and confusing. All I wanted was to make a dead simple hello-world node app that let me write it in VS Code, and recompile the TS to JS every time I saved. Suddenly I had to learn about tsconfig.json, had to install nodemon and have a process running in the background that I'm sure to forget to kill later, and I have no idea how either tsc or ts-node plays into any of this... in the end I just decided to go with ES2016 and be done with it. Too bad, because I really like having type information available, especially for catching bugs. I enabled VS's "pretend JS is TS" setting so it catches some errors, but it's pretty hacky and not thorough, and I don't get to specify types in my program. Really wish I could get a dead simple TS app figured out.
  - curryhowardiso 9y ago
    Will this be fixed when a "canonical" docker container comes out for it? Or perhaps two containers - 1 for dev & dev dependencies and 1 for "prod"?
  - RhodesianHunter 9y ago
    You could always just opt for a typed language.
    - endless1234 9y ago
      Which typed language do you prefer to run in browsers?
      - penpapersw 9y ago
        On that note, I wonder if we'll ever see type="text/typescript" in the browser due to how much traction it's gaining so quickly, and considering it's basically always ESNext but with types.
        mintplant 9y ago
        Not likely. WebAssembly is the path to expanding language support in the browser now.
- keymone 9y ago
  i have the same feeling about clojurescript. sanity in your browser, at last.
chrisan 9y ago
> the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types You can type args and returns. One of the biggest things I relied on when I coded AS3
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- boubiyeah 9y ago
  I meant for higher order functions, callbacks, etc. e.g, see the signature of Array.map: map(callback:Function, thisObject:* = null):Array
jsight 9y ago
I'm glad that someone else said that. I really hated AS3 as a language and was really happy that the ECMAScript spec didn't take their ideas. Typescript does everything that AS3 could do, but does it in a way that is much more friendly to the JavaScript way.

tomc1985 9y ago

To say nothing of their ridiculous security sandbox design... I remember trying to make banner ads with dynamic price data and between all the various detached hosting abstractions and ActionScript's security requirements (in a time before this kind of setup was common) it was a hell of a project.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.

nojvek 9y ago
When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better. Now it can die happily.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  You should look at C# in .NET core as well. C# was designed by the same guy as Typescript and Delphi, the famous language designer Anders Hejlsberg. His languages are the most logical and elegant I have used, all truly pleasant to work with. Building a decent language that compiles down so cleanly to Javascript is a minor miracle.
- rpwverheij 9y ago
  exactly, loving the typing of AS3, typescript is what made me switch over to reimplementing everything in javascript.
penpapersw 9y ago
I tried TypeScript yesterday and while I really love the language, the tooling was wayyyy too complicated and confusing. All I wanted was to make a dead simple hello-world node app that let me write it in VS Code, and recompile the TS to JS every time I saved. Suddenly I had to learn about tsconfig.json, had to install nodemon and have a process running in the background that I'm sure to forget to kill later, and I have no idea how either tsc or ts-node plays into any of this... in the end I just decided to go with ES2016 and be done with it. Too bad, because I really like having type information available, especially for catching bugs. I enabled VS's "pretend JS is TS" setting so it catches some errors, but it's pretty hacky and not thorough, and I don't get to specify types in my program. Really wish I could get a dead simple TS app figured out.
- curryhowardiso 9y ago
  Will this be fixed when a "canonical" docker container comes out for it? Or perhaps two containers - 1 for dev & dev dependencies and 1 for "prod"?
- RhodesianHunter 9y ago
  You could always just opt for a typed language.
  - endless1234 9y ago
    Which typed language do you prefer to run in browsers?
    - penpapersw 9y ago
      On that note, I wonder if we'll ever see type="text/typescript" in the browser due to how much traction it's gaining so quickly, and considering it's basically always ESNext but with types.
      - mintplant 9y ago
        Not likely. WebAssembly is the path to expanding language support in the browser now.
keymone 9y ago
i have the same feeling about clojurescript. sanity in your browser, at last.

chrisan 9y ago

> the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types You can type args and returns. One of the biggest things I relied on when I coded AS3

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
boubiyeah 9y ago
I meant for higher order functions, callbacks, etc. e.g, see the signature of Array.map: map(callback:Function, thisObject:* = null):Array

jsight 9y ago

I'm glad that someone else said that. I really hated AS3 as a language and was really happy that the ECMAScript spec didn't take their ideas. Typescript does everything that AS3 could do, but does it in a way that is much more friendly to the JavaScript way.