I am becoming quite fond of Flex and as3. I find there are only a couple of language features from other OOP languages that I miss badly. As stated elsewhere I miss the ability to control threads (although that is not really an OOP issue). But the OOP things I miss are:
Ability to pass either by value or by reference and to make it very explicit and unambiguous. Maybe I am just an old fuddy-duddy but don’t like languages deciding such things FOR me. How do you all feel?
C++ is an overly complicated language which I happen to have deep affection for. I love Java too. I really miss the ability to have overloaded constructors. This is the ability to have multiple constructors that take different parameters. Sure it complicates things at times, but other times it can lead to very elegant code. YES I know you can use REST parameters or just specify an Object and then pack that object with different parameters as needed, but you lose type safety and most important you lose elegance. I don’t care so much about operator overloading or obscure stuff like that, but having more than one constructor is a must have feature.
While airing out my list of missing features, I had always loved the way enums are implemented in Pascal and C++.
Last but not least, and most controversial… For AIR to be a SERIOUS development language, you need to be able to interact with the native OS and spawn external applications. I don’t mean “load an external swf movie”. I mean make a native OS API call or run a small command line script to do so. I NEED a way to determine real versus virtual system memory, the way any other programming language would let me query. I realize this is a security issue in browser context, but for AIR it is not that big of a stretch to envision native app spawning. That said, Flash/flex/air is woefully inadequate in memory/heap oriented functionality. For instance, I could show you in a couple of minutes how to write an application that can crash your system hard in as3 by allocating memory faster than the OS can page out to its VM–whether this is Mac or Windows, in-browser context or standalone Flash player, or even an AIR package. When I test code I TEST code and run it through torturous conditions and I am amazed how easily AS3 code can be coaxed into crashing the OS doing completely legal things. Maybe the fact that I would prefer to manage my own garbage collection is showing, but I am not even asking for that. I just need to be able to know more than ONE single property about the state of the heap/memory pool.
Hmm, I guess what I am asking is that Adobe continue on the trajectory they already seem to be on of having AS evolve from a designer-centric tool to a programmer-centric tool and add the type of systems level support, especially to the AIR RIA environs, to let us write full functioned applications, not just move around pretty pictures! <ducking and hiding while the art/design people throw tomatoes at me>
