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My personal experience is that AS3 was a better experience over JS and Flex4 was a pleasure to work over the JS frameworks and CSS mess.

jondubois 8y ago
AS3 was better than TypeScript in several ways; - It was interpreted natively (no build step). It was fast. AS3 was much faster than AS2. - It was heavily targeted at games. Games have a lot of objects and those objects tend to have complex relationships with each other (I.e. more inheritance and more polymorphic compositions; where different objects can be passed to the same method to produce different effects).
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  If I have to continue doing any kind of front end work, I would be very okay with a native TypeScript runtime in the browser with support for modules. Add in the option for a flag to skip type-checking and we might have a win-win for fans of pure ES6/7/8.
Matthias247 8y ago
Overall AS3 with Flex felt great, and I used it for one of the funnest projects I've ever worked on (prototyping for a new GUI system). The inbuilt widgets functionalities were great, with things like skinning functionality and the ability to place shaders on widgets right on your fingertip. States were easy to model. I think it took Javascript years to catch up, and while now some of the modern frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) might be ahead in lots of regards, they might still be behind in others. Actionscript itself had a pretty weak type system compared to what Typescript can do now (or could do years ago). E.g. there were no generics, apart from the some kind of semimagical vector. So this one is the smaller loss.
- simion314 8y ago
  I agree, my point was not that AS3 > TS , my point was that AS3 > JS still and AS3 is old and it had no improvements in years. The GUI part is still behind though, you still can't CSS the scrollbars and you need a JS library, you can't CSS the select options and you need a library to create a better dropdown, you have no built-in or a standard set of Widgets simlar to the DataGrid or AdvancedDataGrid, working on some old projects CSS drives me crazy

jondubois 8y ago

AS3 was better than TypeScript in several ways; - It was interpreted natively (no build step). It was fast. AS3 was much faster than AS2. - It was heavily targeted at games. Games have a lot of objects and those objects tend to have complex relationships with each other (I.e. more inheritance and more polymorphic compositions; where different objects can be passed to the same method to produce different effects).

52-6F-62 8y ago
If I have to continue doing any kind of front end work, I would be very okay with a native TypeScript runtime in the browser with support for modules. Add in the option for a flag to skip type-checking and we might have a win-win for fans of pure ES6/7/8.

Matthias247 8y ago

Overall AS3 with Flex felt great, and I used it for one of the funnest projects I've ever worked on (prototyping for a new GUI system). The inbuilt widgets functionalities were great, with things like skinning functionality and the ability to place shaders on widgets right on your fingertip. States were easy to model. I think it took Javascript years to catch up, and while now some of the modern frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) might be ahead in lots of regards, they might still be behind in others. Actionscript itself had a pretty weak type system compared to what Typescript can do now (or could do years ago). E.g. there were no generics, apart from the some kind of semimagical vector. So this one is the smaller loss.

simion314 8y ago
I agree, my point was not that AS3 > TS , my point was that AS3 > JS still and AS3 is old and it had no improvements in years. The GUI part is still behind though, you still can't CSS the scrollbars and you need a JS library, you can't CSS the select options and you need a library to create a better dropdown, you have no built-in or a standard set of Widgets simlar to the DataGrid or AdvancedDataGrid, working on some old projects CSS drives me crazy