And now, for your heresy, we must tie you to a stake and burn you ;-) On Oct 22, 2005, at 04:13 PM, Aral Balkan wrote:
> It's funny, Richard, because the now-much-ridiculed-and-looked-down- > upon > AS1 actually shares a lot in common with Ruby. All right, > everything is > not an object but at least it is object-based and we have all the > advantages of AOP, interceptors, etc. or can easily create them. > Thinking about things, I am at odds with myself as to whether AS > should > be going where AS3 is taking it (much closer to Java) when Java > programmers are trying to make Java more dynamic and lighter and > defecting in scores to languages like Ruby. In many ways, AS and JavaScript, let's just say ECMAscript, is possibly the most successful and unlikely OO language ever. It lacks, shall we say, symmetry, elegance, and power (or scalability), but in many ways supports more pure OO concepts than AS2++ or even Java. And it's very accessible for people who do not have extensive training in programming, i.e. the vast majority of Flash developers. Many of the complaints that I hear about AS1, and therefore the reasons why AS2 and presumably AS3 are better, were things that could have been fixed by themselves without resorting to extending the language. In fact, simply a more strict adherence to the ECMA standard (esp. with respect to behaviors around the undefined type) would have made AS1 a more development friendly language. In some ways, the push to AS2 and beyond seems to be the result of serious programmers (like many of us on this list) delving into this great technology. But I question whether we didn't bring too many of our Java and C++ techniques and expectations with us. When I look at the MM V2 component architecture, what I see is a Java or C++ approach to a UI class hierarchy. And the use of fairly clever OO techniques in a situation where they are not actually necessary. I see the benefit in overhauling the Flash VM to get rid some of some historic artifacts and baggage. And it's clear that MM is looking for "serious programmer" or "enterprise" credibility for Flash, so I wonder if it wouldn't have been better simply to make the language Java instead of this not quite so easy to use ActionScript that looks and acts and reads a lot like Java. Personally I would have settled for an improved AS1 and fixes to the Flash authoring environment that would have made something like MTASC unnecessary. OK, so now I can be tied to the stake too. -Tom -- Tom George http://www.designaxiom.com _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
