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I professionally saw the rise, the peak and the burn of Director (Shockwave), Flash and Silverlight... By far, the most devastating one, was Flash. One good t

by keyle 3y ago

I professionally saw the rise, the peak and the burn of Director (Shockwave), Flash and Silverlight... By far, the most devastating one, was Flash. One good thing came out of Silverlight, and it's not really getting the credit it deserves: MVVM. As far as I know, Silverlight brought that pattern to light, before that, it was MVC and OO hell. And MVVM paved the way to modern paradigms, imho.

sanitycheck 3y ago
Oh, me too. So much now-obsolete knowledge accumulated! Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. In the end it was killed (arguably) prematurely, but it probably wouldn't have lasted more than another 5-6 years anyway. Silverlight, I think, was worse - only a few years between initial launch and discontinuation. Pretty much every client app based on Silverlight would have had to have been rewritten from the ground up within a couple of years of completion. I try to learn lessons, in life. One of them is to not rely much on any Microsoft technology that's less than 10 years old.
- keyle 3y ago
  I remember the transition to WPF apps was awfully painful.
- throwaway_0235 3y ago
  > Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. I'm not sure that would happen. I think Flash would evolve to just "compile" to HMTL/JS. IOS/Android could be other targets as well, once they found a way that would not upset the Eye of Apple.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Not if Adobe was developing it. Flash was terrible for performance and battery life, and it was wedded to the classic fixed-size window with a keyboard and mouse. Even Android users who had access hated it. Now, it’s possible that some of that could’ve improved (battery life would’ve been hard due to the scene timing model) but Adobe just isn’t a platform company. They didn’t even want to fix the security problems, much less all of their half-assed APIs - they were even worse than Sun for announcing ambitious frameworks duplicating built-in OS features, shipping the easiest 40%, and then letting it stagnate because there was no way fixing the hard stuff would get them a second keynote.
jen20 3y ago
MVVM was also the prescribed pattern for WPF (which shares some other things like XAML with Silverlight). WPF debuted a year earlier though!
- keyle 3y ago
  Ah, there you go! TIL.

by keyle 3y ago

sanitycheck 3y ago

Oh, me too. So much now-obsolete knowledge accumulated! Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. In the end it was killed (arguably) prematurely, but it probably wouldn't have lasted more than another 5-6 years anyway. Silverlight, I think, was worse - only a few years between initial launch and discontinuation. Pretty much every client app based on Silverlight would have had to have been rewritten from the ground up within a couple of years of completion. I try to learn lessons, in life. One of them is to not rely much on any Microsoft technology that's less than 10 years old.

keyle 3y ago
I remember the transition to WPF apps was awfully painful.
throwaway_0235 3y ago
> Flash was always going to die someday though, as HTML/JS caught up with it. I'm not sure that would happen. I think Flash would evolve to just "compile" to HMTL/JS. IOS/Android could be other targets as well, once they found a way that would not upset the Eye of Apple.
- acdha 3y ago
  Not if Adobe was developing it. Flash was terrible for performance and battery life, and it was wedded to the classic fixed-size window with a keyboard and mouse. Even Android users who had access hated it. Now, it’s possible that some of that could’ve improved (battery life would’ve been hard due to the scene timing model) but Adobe just isn’t a platform company. They didn’t even want to fix the security problems, much less all of their half-assed APIs - they were even worse than Sun for announcing ambitious frameworks duplicating built-in OS features, shipping the easiest 40%, and then letting it stagnate because there was no way fixing the hard stuff would get them a second keynote.

jen20 3y ago

MVVM was also the prescribed pattern for WPF (which shares some other things like XAML with Silverlight). WPF debuted a year earlier though!

keyle 3y ago
Ah, there you go! TIL.