I’m sure I’m going to be running the HN gauntlet here, but AS3+Flex was a beautiful time to be coding for me. I was paid to basically knock corporate front-end

I’m sure I’m going to be running the HN gauntlet here, but AS3+Flex was a beautiful time to be coding for me. I was paid to basically knock corporate front-end software out (what would now be certainly termed SPAs, oh, how we reinvented the wheel…) day in and day out when Flash wasn’t a very naughty, bad swear word. We knew how it would run in every browser, it was responsive and it seamlessly integrated with all our backend web services. Easily. I honestly feel that it’s only in the last year or two HTML/JS is now at parity with where we were with this stuff nearly 10 years ago. Yes, it is clearly much better now for all sorts of reasons, I won’t sugar coat it… Flash also sucked badly. Very badly. but… AS3 with Flex “bindings/proper ties” was a beautiful set up. It just worked. Always. Everywhere. The only other language I’ve felt a serious affinity with was Objective-C. It’s the only language where I knew when I hit compile/run any errors were on me. Maybe it’s just having spent years in those ecosystems/languages and developing what some might call “mastery”, I never got surprised. I never felt like a master. People above me always knew so much more. I do remember writing a couple of thousand lines of Obj-c over two heavily caffeine fuelled days, hitting run for the first time and it just worked. Years on I still find “gotchas” in JS and CSS that I just never found in those languages. Maybe I thought about code more back then? Constant integration and hot reloads all the time, just make it all feel a bit different. Maybe I’m just set in my ways from spending a day typing out Spectrum machine code from the back of a magazine? Anyway… my favourite language of all time is Objective-c, that’s all I actually wanted to say. Rant over.