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> 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 abou

by Kequc 13y ago

> 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.

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
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.
- egypturnash 13y ago
  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.

by Kequc 13y ago

TheZenPsycho 13y ago

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.

egypturnash 13y ago
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.