Thursday, September 11, 2008

now that I've gotten to know it better...

ActionScript has replaced javascript as the #1 Thing I Would Hate to Be Stuck Doing for All Eternity When I Go to Hell.

All these kidlets rushing out to embrace AJAX and doing some hellaciously complex stuff in js for the past 3 years suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense.

I'm also seeing a lot of parallels between Adobe's AS and MS's AFX^H^H^HMFC stuff. I wonder if Adobe knows that this evolutionary branch is a doomed one, and whether or not they've started thinking about how they're going to handle their very own version of the VB6 developer .Net revolt that's looming in the far off future.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Javascript I'm not finding is too bad, IE6 is much easier to support with the js libraries.

Duck typing + prototyping confuses most people at first though...

Unknown said...

I'd already had experience with those in other languages... the new beast for me was the concept of "closures", and I only really ran into them when dinking around with the Google Maps stuff.

My only real gripe against js is that it's a PITA to debug. Firebug helps out a lot, but things still get funky when you are eval'ing scripts dynamically. Also, a command line interpreter would be really nice to have so you could easily do unit tests on libs. :(

As a result of that, ActionScript (which is ecmascript which means its pretty much the same as js) isn't too bad... on it's own. When you add in the funky classes with methods that don't always behave consistently, it really turns into a quagmire, though. The various actionscript forums are filled with so many work arounds for different little thing that it's depressing.