Actionscript 4.0

[Krilnon]

I'm seeing a lot of complaints on AS3 being hard to learn. Coming from a decade of Java/C++, I spent a week reading Adobe's AS3 tutorials, and was comfortable with AS3 in a month. And not just with "Hello World"-type stuff.

People with your background weren't the ones complaining. It was mostly the AS1 and AS2 users. In fact, a lot of the changes made from AS1 to AS3 were to make it easier for people like you to transition.

Someone, earlier in the thread, pointed out how most programing languages would never permit access to a root object. It's not considered a 'clean', compartmentalized thing to do.

Part of the difference is that "general purpose" languages don't have a clear concept of what a root object would be, whereas scripting languages, by many common definitions, are controlling a specific application (and are essentially tied to it). In the case of Flash Player, there was traditionally only one rectangle that you could control the display of at any given time. And, as you said, AS3 was a move to make AS closer to something that could be considered general purpose. At some point it seems silly to be too clean and compartmentalized if you're limiting access to the only thing your language can control anyway.

There's still root in AS3.

I suspect SlimyTadpole's point was that you can't access it from all lexical contexts like you could in older ActionScript. Perhaps it's analogous to proposals to remove window from being the global scope in parts of JavaScript.

The same with the untyped variables, although AS3 still allows them, the APIs do not.

APIs only restrict values, not variables. You can use a variable without a type annotation to reference a value that you pass to an API that has type annotated parameters, as long as the value is of the correct type at runtime or you don't mind getting a runtime error.

Coming from a C++/Java background, I'm a huge fan of strongly-typed variables, and never use untyped variables. Do people using AS3 really still use them? I don't recall seeing any code examples, on this board, or others, where untyped variables are used.

People do omit type annotations sometimes, but you're right that you don't see it too often. Personally, I think that's not an ideal situation. I kind find the actual reference that I'm looking for, but the designers of Google's Dart and ECMAScript Harmony (different people) have said on a number of occasions that it's not productive to over-annotate values. It can be a waste of time, especially when projects are young and decisions are still changing about the way that the whole system will fit together.

Type inference makes a lot of function-local variable annotations pointless. If the compiler and IDE can prove the types of local variables without your annotations, then it's truly a waste of time to add them... unless you think someone's going to come along later with an under-featured text editor and poor understanding of your project and try to make changes. At that point, though, type annotations aren't enough to be sure of the impact that code changes will have anyway.

[Abhishek Jain]

Well I didn't read all of the posts, but just want to share my 2 bits in this discussion.

I am a C++/Java game programmer and just started to work on AS3 4 days ago. I thought that it'd be a hard to learn language, after reading it's review from all the pro AS2 developers(Some from my company too). But now I can say that I don't feel any difference in working except the coding in timeline thing. I am seeing the same syntax as Java and it feels familiar. What I find unusual is putting all the asset in single fla file and have their own timeline. Till yesterday I thought why on the earth each object has it's own timeline, but now I understood the point after reading the evaluation of flash and actionscript.
Flash was made for designers who don't have knowledge of programming languages and other technical stuffs, but still want to create their own animation, movies and games. ActionScript was just an additional tool to help them, but was just a supporting tool. Now what I can sense is, Adobe is trying to add more programmers than designers in their regime. It's a good strategy, but the oldies are not happy about it.

I read somewhere that adobe was trying to complete the "Easy to code" thing first, and then move to "Easy to design". So they did all they could for programmers, now it's designers' turn. Although I doubt it.

So in short words, AS3 is a great tool, created to follow the standards and to make people like me, who are migrating from other languages, comfortable. I don't think they'll change everything again in AS4. They can't risk the existing userbase.

[senocular]

I don't think they'll change everything again in AS4. They can't risk the existing userbase.

Interesting.

[TheCanadian]

That's not interesting at all!

[senocular]

Learning new things is a great way to prevent Alzheimers. Just saying.

[TheCanadian]

That was pretty interesting…

[Gathan]

Interesting.

Oh no...please don't even suggest something like Adobe completely changing everything like they did in AS3...

Learning new things is a great way to prevent Alzheimers. Just saying.

Or getting a headache from knowing AS1/AS2/AS3/AS4?! Wait what am I talking about...

[Krilnon]

ActionScript Spoiler: Made you look!

[tbo]

spent some time on that with my current mobile browser setup... only to be fooled.

[TheCanadian]

ActionScript Spoiler: Made you look!

Yes you did.

[Gathan]

ActionScript Spoiler: Made you look!

I hate you...And yes you did make me look

[senocular]

Or getting a headache from knowing AS1/AS2/AS3/AS4?! Wait what am I talking about...

And it doesn't stop with just language versioning. Yes. You will be confused. And its not getting any better.

Hmm. Maybe I should have made that a spoiler.