This is my first post but one of concern to me, I apologize in advance if this topic has been covered in a different thread. If so, please direct me to it, well I will be doing some searches later.
I am learning Actionscript 3.0 and am finding it more difficult than PERL, and on that note, even more difficult than Python. The language itself seems very similar to JAVA and I would assume C++ to an extent, although I haven’t been emersed in those languages as much, I’ve been more of a scripter.
So I did take a look at Actionscript 2.0 though years back and 2.0 to 3.0 to me, seems like worlds apart. Okay so, no big deal, I don’t mind pulling my hair here and there to learn it, I’ve done harder things before and AS3 is catching on,…
So my question is this,
Is it likely that Adobe or whomever will make AS4 or AS5 even more difficult? or more importantly, as drastically different?
I don’t mind picking up AS3 but now that I am, I’m looking at AS2 and thinking “It was a good thing I skipped AS2 and put off learning actionscript until now,” because I would have been training my brain to think in a completely different way. When starting with AS3, atleast you are getting familiar with syntax that will be somewhat similar to JAVA.
My concern is about AS4 or AS5, and if those could possibly bring drastic changes. I seriously don’t want to learn AS3 and find out AS4 is going to take another steep learning curve.
It is to my understanding that Adobe is falling behind in the platform market.
As a language the specs are very close to ECMAScript itself, specially AS2 and JavaScript ES5.
The main difference is the platform API (built-in classes, objects and OS/Browser access limits).
That said, I left flash/flex/shockwave a long time ago and TypeScript is my new shiny toy.
Despite this being an ancient thread, there will very likely be no more ActionScript releases coming out of Adobe. The Flash Platform has been end-of-lifed (in 2020), and ActionScript 4 was spec’d (4 yrs ago), but an implementation was never released. An alignment with ActionScript and JavaScript (ECMAScript) was supposed to happen with ES4, but that was skipped and instead the much simpler feature set of ES5 was released in it’s place. ES4 was considered too complicated and the idea was no one would ever want classes in JavaScript… you know, until ES6 . After the failure of ES4, AS4 was meant to be a familiar language - much like AS3 - but without the impeding restrictions of the current ECMA specification; basically an open ticket to doing whatever Adobe wanted to help maximize performance. It was progressing nicely for a while but it was too little too late and it never made it out the door. That’s when Flash conceded to the web and ended up down it’s current path. The path of impending doom.
[off-topic]
I can’t believe you are still around!!!
I remember the old forums when you used a 6 eyed fish as avatar!
And now I feel ashamed for leaving…
Player V12 with AS4 was supposed to be the phoenix rising from the flames. Reimagined from the ground up without consideration for standards or backwards compatibility, focusing on low-level APIs bringing you close to the metal for optimal performance in gaming applications - and we had the initial numbers showing a lot of improvement in many of our benchmarks (some especially impressive). Just didn’t happen.
In a way Flash was its own worst enemy. It’s extremely old codebase and desire to not break the web (which JavaScript is now starting to have problems with) made it really difficult to work with. Combine that with all of the supported environments (OSes, browsers, platforms like AIR…) and the fact that APIs kept changing and evolving - I’m looking at you Google - caused a lot of the problems it had. V12 would have addressed much of that.
Eventually a V12 was released, though it was based on the old player. It was kind of an inside joke. “We finally did it! V12 is out!” only it wasn’t the same V12/AS4 release we’ve been frantically trying to make happen.
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. After the failure of ES4, AS4 was meant to be a familiar language - much like AS3 - but without the impeding restrictions of the current ECMA specification; basically an open ticket to doing whatever Adobe wanted to help maximize performance. It was progressing nicely for a while but it was too little too late and it never made it out the door. That’s when Flash conceded to the web and ended up down it’s current path. The path of impending doom.
