The people (like me) that have passed through the assembly and C++
route have done so not as a way to become better AS3 developers but
because our situations required that we program assembler and C++.
Those skills help us with AS3 but aren't an efficient route to take.
Don't go there.
Like how many people do machine code in college vs how many people
actually use it outside the classroom... Machine code is not
efficient. C for me was possibly the most useful thing to learn because
it's the basis for a lot of things and a happy medium between assembler
- yuck and still having control.... C++ was/is a bugger to learn
because it was the first OOP language I had used. The other problem
was that trying to do stuff in Windows with C++ was a nightmare - so
many API's to confuse the lone learner.
With C / C++ you also don't have the "safety" of the garbage collector,
virtual machine etc. to forgive your mistakes. You do something wrong
in C / C++ you could end up with a BSOD, or a broken CD Writer (ahem).
I got into Flash & ActionScript because it was the fastest and easiest
way of getting something to show on the screen - I had tried with C,
C++, Java and got varying degrees of results, but found that the
knowledge gaps in Flash were very small - it was easy to get something
you were proud of / satisfied with quickly. Even with coding in the
IDE... AS3 might have shifted the ball game a bit, but it's probably
still the easiest dev environment I have come across for visual
"applications".
I hated Visual Studio - especially trying to work out how to draw to the
screen from an MFC based app (oops) - it took about 2 years of messing
round and going through various books to finally get something half
arsed going, then I encountered the pain of DirectX which was glossed
over in the book.
Compare that with Flash and Papervision, how quickly can you get stuff
running, although we do have stuff like Open Frameworks, etc. now, it
might be worth trying some C / C++ stuff again when the AS3 can't handle
the performance requirements...
My reason for asking about C++ and AS3 together was because I wanted to
see how many people in the marketplace might have those skills - I
thought the response would be less, so that's promising.
Glen
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