>>I would argue that approachability for newbies is what has made HTML/JS so >>popular. I think we need popularity in order to get buzz that opens >>opportunities for new work and ensures community longevity. A >>smaller >>community of high-end specialists have an uphill battle to fight for >>mindshare. But for sure, we need to make sure you can do really advanced >>things as well.
I would argue its ubiquity. I don't know any advanced developer that is excited about HTML/JS as a language. Those of us excited about it are excited by its ubiquity and the capabilities of the VM, not the language. >>To me, a newbie will quickly become intermediate-level because he/she doesn't >>have to learn about AOP and other advanced topics, and then will need to >>debug an app (with a debugger, not trace statements). >>I've yet to ship >>anything without having to debug into it, and I think it is important to be >>able to understand the application behavior. Productivity is a strong-suit >>of Flex, especially for intermediates. I have spent the last 8 years of my life teaching and trying to get companies to adopt Flex. I saw it as a revolving door where people came in and left. Although Adobe willfully ignored it, we already had a huge problem converting someone new to intermediate. In my experience, our retention rate was around 15% of people who started and we had huge problems making the senior architects and developers in a company want to work with this framework. That in turn made it difficult to ever get adoption throughout. >>Agreed, but IMHO, it has to be simple not only so it can be understood by >>newbies and intermediates (and me), but also so it can be shippable. Spark >>was a better architecture than MX, but the fact is, it took too >>long to >>create components in Spark. Yep, that's why I think evolutionary change is better than revolutionary change right now >>My goal in these discussions is not to try to kill these ideas, mainly to >>point out the counter-arguments and explain some history. I am all for >>radical change, I'm planning a full re-write as you know. Mine too :) You have history from the Adobe engineering side. I have a lot of history from the companies that chose *not* to use it. That did one project and then dropped it. The failed projects. The developers who found it unworkable and unscalable. >>I still believe we are working with a constrained environment and techniques >>you might find in Java can't be universally implemented in AS. Agreed, but concepts don't necessarily apply to one language. Their implementation pattern might. Things need to be discussed through an understanding of ActionScript but simply ignoring those possibilities as they are foreign is silly too. Sometimes a problem has been solved well. Mike Notice: This transmission is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged or confidential. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this transmission by anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail or telephone and delete the original transmission. Thank you.
