Okay, so I decided to give flash programming a try. Around 2000 or so, I took a look AS, I was not impressed by what I saw. Now, in 2006 I took another look and though "hey, this is pretty nice". Thus, I thought I would whip up a few fun games with it. But as I am trying to do that, my rage at macromedia/AS is growing. I have extensive programmin experience in C, C++, Java, PHP and .NET and I am saddened by the fact that the flash platform and AS is the standard in which we must write "real time" interactive content for the web. Macromedia has done a huge disservice to programmer kind by making the flash platform in a way which requires you to engade in all kinds of wierd faggotry of the "Action Script" language to make programs in it.
Discuss.
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Anonymous2006-01-26 13:42 (sage)
All I see is whining and bad English.
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Anonymous2006-01-26 15:31
Disregard that rant. Now that I have found mtasc and swfmill, my level of frusturation has decreased.
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Anonymous2006-01-26 19:38
My criticism goes towards the rendering engine. It's still slow as fuck. Why couldn't they use 3D acceleration for it? And why is it so pitifully slow? When I see a vector animation stutter and skip in anything over a Pentium 2, I get saddened.
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Anonymous2006-01-28 4:44
>>1
Tell Macromedia to go fuck themselves and use CSS and/or a real scripting language. Seriously, I get angry every time I see a website that uses Flash for anything except movies. There's no reason I should have to install another program just to use your stupid-ass website.
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Anonymous2006-01-28 7:28
My friend tried to induce me, how superb flash is. He has made some realy nice guestbook in flash. It had nice design, all the functions and even wasn't very big...
So I opened some simple page in my browser. I resized window back and forth and asked: "Can flash do this?" Then I selected part of text with mouse. "Can flash do this?" I copied it to the clipboard using keyboard. "Can flash do this?" I scrolled down using mouse wheel. I magnified text size back and forth. "Can flash do this?" I saved some bookmark from that page. I saved picture using right-clicking. "Can flash do this?"
There's no need to mention such things as rendering engine, consumption of memory, necessity of third-side program. Just demonstrate all those things written above. It takes about one minute and no one can argue against it.
(>>2: Sorry for my bad English but not everyone is native speaker and not everyone has had it at school)
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Anonymous2006-01-28 9:56
>>6
Your English is fine. Thanks for using our language.
So I opened some simple page in my browser. I resized window back and forth and asked: "Can flash do this?" Then I selected part of text with mouse. "Can flash do this?" I copied it to the clipboard using keyboard. "Can flash do this?" I scrolled down using mouse wheel. I magnified text size back and forth. "Can flash do this?" I saved some bookmark from that page. I saved picture using right-clicking. "Can flash do this?"
It looks like you won.
As for the rendering engine, well, Flash is still useful because of the lack of a vectorial graphics web standard and how hard does SVG (and anything from Adobe, for that matter) sucks, and the lack of a decent animation web standard, and in some rare cases, the lack of an interactive network protocol for the web I think. Yet you shouldn't be doing buttons, applications, etc. with it, and for the cases you could use Flash, the rendering engine sucks.
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Anonymous2006-01-31 14:51
Flash is still good for making games and movies. If you are making "real time interactive content for the Web" in Flash, learn some fucking HTML and javascript.
ActionScript is really ECMAScript, which is a hell of a powerful prototype-based-OO scripting language that's on par with perl and PHP. The only problem with Flash with regards to scripting is the slow ActionScript compiler and interpreter.
I definitely agree with >>4 as well. Flash 8's bitmap caching feature helps a little but not enough. Take any Amiga 500 demo and compare its graphical performance to Flash's. It's at least 100:1.
and movies
Only if vectorial, otherwise it stinks that you cannot play them in full screen or save them easily; then again it stinks even more that browser plugins suck, QuickTime sucks, and Real sucks
slow ActionScript compiler and interpreter
I wonder why they didn't use Python. It's powerful, clean and fast.
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Anonymous2006-01-31 15:57
I wonder why they didn't use Python. It's powerful, clean and fast.
___lol__python___
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Anonymous2006-01-31 17:34
Python is not the be all and end all of languages. I hate how some people seem to think it is, and try to stuff it down everyone's throat. Yeah, I use it, but I wasn't impressed, and I'm still not. Clean? Hah!
If you need a small and fast embedded language for the web, maybe replace Javascript (and ActionScript) with something like Lua, not that monstrous, and a lot slower, Python. Lua is far from perfect, but it's better suited for this.
Right tool for the job, what a concept!
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Anonymous2006-02-01 3:12
>>11
Having said that, I would like to see more options for the J in AJAX. Now that the concept has really taken off, I think it's only a matter of time before that happens, same way as alternatives for the P in LAMP have become available.
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Anonymous2006-02-01 11:23
>>10
__yes__, __python__ :) I know __this__ sucks, but pretty much everything about its syntax is ok to great.
>>11
Lua is amazingly fast, but it doesn't seem to have other advantages than that...
>>12
I also want to drop the X, they only added it to please stupid managers with all this bullshit XML hype. XML is not that good an idea for this, you usually do what fits best your problem and you don't need that damned huge parser when you can use native (JavaScript or whatever) code, for example.
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Anonymous2006-02-01 16:00
>>13
Well the idea is to use XML as a generic communication protocol, much in the way that XHTML is used to communicate with your browser. Since browsers and servers tend to have XML parsers built in, it seems to me a better idea than using ad-hoc protocols.
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Anonymous2006-02-01 17:53
>>13 Lua is amazingly fast, but it doesn't seem to have other advantages than that...
Compared to what? Python? Smaller, faster, easily embedded, and more can be done with less code. I'd say cleaner too, since Python's syntax is generally full of hairs. Mind you, Lua has its own set of issues.
That size difference in particular cannot be understated. You can make python a lot smaller by stripping most of the libraries out (yet it'll still be an order of magnitude larger), but if you remove the libraries, python loses its main advantage. Of course, if you're embedding, you should be using hooks provided by the program it's embedded in anyway...
Python shines in other areas, but this isn't one of them.
I would definitely say either Lua or Javascript are the best tools for the job in both Flash and AJAX, and Javascript's main issue is simply that every existing interpreter for it sucks balls...
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Anonymous2006-02-02 3:21
Scheme > Lua
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Anonymous2006-02-02 3:37
>>16
Nothing that Javascript (or most dynamic languages) don't suffer from: accidentally assigning to a misspelled variable. AFAIK, only Perl has mechanisms to prevent this, via strict.
It's outside my field of experience, but I've heard a couple game industry types gripe that hunting down such bugs in Lua AI code can be maddening.
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Anonymous2006-02-02 10:23
>>14
Problem is, XML is *NOT* a protocol. Managers think if they have XML everything's done. Well, XML is a metalanguage, and it says nothing about how you should treat XML data. The problem of treating data is the same, only you're introducing an ugly, huge, slow parser in the way when you could just use the language's eval.
>>18 accidentally assigning to a misspelled variable
It's common in scripted languages. If this is the worst thing you can say about JavaScript, then it must be a great language. BTW, Python can help here, as you can still assign a value to a misspelt variable, but in many cases when accessing it you'll get an exception since you have to assign them first before referencing a variable, unlike PHP or Perl without strict, for example.
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Anonymous2006-02-02 10:32
>>19 when you could just use the language's eval.
That's great, so you tie yourself down to one language.
I honestly think this is one of the few cases where the usage of XML isn't hype. For one thing the AJAX pattern wasn't created by managers; it was created by geeks.
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Anonymous2006-02-02 20:19
>>19 If this is the worst thing you can say about JavaScript
I wasn't talking about Javascript, I was talking about Lua. I don't know Javascript, but from what I hear, Lua is a prettier sister.
If nobody comes up with a Javascript implementation that doesn't completely suck in the performance department soon, maybe we should use Lua in Javascript's place. This'll probably never happen (inertia, particularly thanks to IE), which is too bad. If we really want to get decent webapps, a language implementation faster than a slug will be needed.
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Anonymous2006-02-08 10:24
What the fuck are you niggers talking about
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Anonymous2006-02-08 10:58
You cannot expect a scripting language to have the same functionality as compiled code, it's extremely difficult to get anywhere close to a similar level of performance. The very nature of scripting also means you don't have ther versitility of a full programming language.
Flash uses vectors which have a number of advantages: looking smooth at any resolution, very easy transformations and is more efficient than bitmaps for storage. It is extremely CPU intensive and they could use vector units in gfx cards to improve this. However the flash plugin is small, usually indescreet (unless you have problems you don't notice the engine starting), do you really want it bloated with a large amount of opengl code that won't be able to run on every system (even though most pcs can run opengl). Look at the adobe acrobat plugin to see what happens if you make plugins too complex and feature rich
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Anonymous2006-02-08 12:35 (sage)
>>23
sage for your not knowing what you're talking aboot
You cannot expect a scripting language to have the same functionality as compiled code
Village of Wrong
it's extremely difficult to get anywhere close to a similar level of performance
Wrong again, functionality != performance
The very nature of scripting also means you don't have ther versitility of a full programming language.
Not only wrong, but you hit just the opposite.
do you really want it bloated with a large amount of opengl code that won't be able to run on every system (even though most pcs can run opengl)
Yes. I want three Flash plugins: a decent one for PCs. 10 MB ain't nothing, and are downloaded only once. The common one for people who can't cope with it and other platforms without OpenGL support. And a much smaller, crappier one which lets you see what's happening for mobile devices.
Look at the adobe acrobat plugin
It's not fair mentioning that piece of shit when comparing plugins. Anything that has anything to do with Adobe's formats is made of ass and poo.
It'll be a lot of trial and error. But it has worked on me and on an ex-girlfriend. She needs to be lying down on her back, very relaxed. Lubricate your finger and insert it into her colon right down to the knuckle. Then move its entire length in and out rapidly. This should cause the muscles responsible for pushing the poo down to her back trap to start working. Eventually, thin, snake-like craps will shoot out past your finger. Don't try anything thicker than a finger as that will block her shithole.
Hope this helps! You may want to practice on yourself in an empty bath or something first.
ActionScript is a better language than JavaScript. Here is why:
- Static typing rather than pig dynamic typing
- Decent OO support rather than bullshit funcperative programming
- All the JIT support that JavaScript is now getting, except it's actually consistent across browsers
- Similarly, a runtime that's actually consistent across browsers
Not surprisingly, the worst parts of ActionScript only exist because of its unfortunate requirement of ECMAScript compatibility:
- No private constructors
- No abstract classes
- Incredibly stupid auto-hoisting that promotes variables inside loop blocks up to the scope of the enclosing function
In conclusion, JavaScript is terrible, and ActionScript is better than expected.
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Anonymous2009-11-01 21:58
>>25
You know, your first example is the only one worth supporting. All laptops made in the past >ten years have OpenGL. Most smartphones these days have OpenGL ES. The iPhone, all Android phones, and all recent Nokia and Windows Mobile phones have it. Did you know the iPhone 3GS even has a programmable pipeline?
Wait a few years and there won't exist a freaking wrist watch without OpenGL.
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Anonymous2009-11-01 22:39
//Javascript:
var foo = "dongs";
//Java:
String foo = "dongs";
//Actionscript:
var foo:String = "dongs";
You can actually see /prog/ getting shittier and shittier over time.
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Anonymous2013-07-21 20:16
>>1
that moment when I realized that my programming background started with AS, and now my new learning is almost like a game, where the lower-languages I go, the more shit I have to do to do basic shit.