I've been lurking for a bit on this thread but I think it's time I threw my 2 cents on the table ;)
IMHO MTASC is just now on the verge of reaching much more widespread acceptance among the larger Flash development community. All of my colleagues in more established agencies which are still using the Flash IDE have either heard of it already or go "wow! that looks amazing" when I mention it to them. The most common reason they aren't using it already are the misconceptions around compatibility and the fact that it requires a certain investment in your workflow and cleaning up the mess that MM's compiler lets you make of your code. I think that these will fade with time as more production-quality sites (including my own) go up developed with MTASC. Granted, many of these shops are still using AS1, so I could be wrong here. But I think the speed increase makes enough of a difference to convince a lot of people. I went from 45-second compilations to less than 5, and wrote up a post on the resulting time savings that surprised even me: http://www.unfitforprint.com/articles/2005/10/19/the-importance-of- short-feedback-cycles While it's Nicolas' show and he can take it wherever he wants, I have to express my disappointment. I for one am not bound by any kind of requirements that would prevent me from using the new language in most of my commercial projects (save the odd contract job, my clients are usually smaller and I almost always deliver binaries only). So there's little monetary interest in my being able to compile with both MM and MTASC. My disappointment lies more in the fact that, if I want to continue benefitting from the speed difference of MTASC, save the remote (and I believe it is remote) chance that someone else with comparable skills will port MTASC to AS3, by next year I'm going to have a drastically smaller community around the language I use. With Ruby, at least there's ten years of history and a reasonable (and growing, thanks to Rails) amount of users developing both open-source and commercial apps with it. I don't see the same thing happening with a non-standard language for generating SWFs; the cost of entry is too high for the majority of developers I know to invest in using it. Again, I want to stress that Nicolas doesn't owe us anything and will take MTASC to where he sees fit, but I would like to ask that he at least consider using his skills to help what I feel will be the greatest number of developers writing code for the Flash platform. ___________________ Ben Jackson Diretor de Desenvolvimento +55 (21) 9997-0593 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.incomumdesign.com _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
