Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different • Hacker News Board

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#181

Post by mattmanser » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 2:12 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #168

mattmanser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set. If you wa…

All the things you list have terrible APIs, poorly thought out mechanics, mish-mashes of design philosophies. I've built silverlight apps and js ones and I disagree that html/js, even if you can use the bleeding edge, is anywhere near as powerful.

I may dislike javascript, sure, but it doesn't make me any less right that it's stupid that we still have no choice but to program in a particular language in today's effective OS, the browser. I generally use typescript now, but it's still rubbish compared to C# or Ruby or Python or [insert your favourite language]. And I feel the inanity of the present build infrastructure that we end up having to use is such an utter waste of my life.

Just think how much you'd chafe if you were forced to use a language you thought was substandard for 30% of your development time and waste hours or days every now and then wrestling build problems that I shouldn't even be thinking about it.

I certainly don't feel it's a chip, I think it's a perfectly sane response.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#182

Post by alttab » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 2:27 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #175

stupidcar wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set. If you wa…

You forget that Flash was a complete, well-rounded development environment, not just a language. It's a difference between Unity and e.g. writing your own solution in C++. The later is certainly way more powerful and gives you a lot more choices and freedom, but it takes a lot of effort and testing and learning to build a really productive tech stack and workflow that way. The same thing with HTML/JS/CSS. So many fra…

"Tools are for pussies - I only code in vim."

All jest aside - it's true that Flash is way more productive than the "true" web environment today. It has its drawbacks, but developer tooling was awesome.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#183

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

Once nice thing about Flash (and believe me, I don't think there are many) is that it can go a long way towards cementing the concept of OOP to beginning programmers.

I was taking a high-school C++ class at the time, but the whole "everything is an object" concept just didn't stick. It was still in the abstract sense and not tangible.

You start to play with Flash and ActionScript, however, and suddenly each instance is a physical thing you can see and interact with. Each copy of the thing you make inherits those properties and that action script.

It was a very useful learning experience for me. I worked through a Pong tutorial and then tried to extend it as a personal project to be a four-corner pong. It became very clear the benefits of making a position-agnostic "Paddle" class when the left-right paddles' collision detection went haywire upon copy-pasting them to the top and bottom of the screen.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#184

Post by soundwave106 » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

theamk wrote: post #51

freehunter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?

C#

I would agree with you on the Winforms portion of the .Net universe.

None of the other parts of the .Net universe are comparable, though; most are either kind of clunky (Webforms) or require a much bigger learning curve to get going.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#185

Post by rawTruthHurts » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 2:39 PM UTC

dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

"Really, I encourage you to try to name one!"

Director

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#186

Post by ygra » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

tomelders wrote: post #166

Macha wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube couldn't have started when it did without flash, even if it's moved on to html5 now. Also lots of indie game devs (e.g. team meat of super meat boy or binding of Isaac) got their start there, a lot of the early "upload your flash game here" might have paved the way for getting so many games on the app store model when it got going.

Had flash not existed, I suspect they would have used another video playback plugin, or rolled their own. I don't think YouTube's success was dependent on Flash. But the ubiquity of Flash certainly didn't hurt.

Imagine YouTube depending on QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or Java Applets. Flash's user experience was just so much better than those options. I'd guess that YouTube couldn't have had that much success were there not such a ubiquitous (and downright good) plugin.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#187

Post by zwetan » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

0x0 wrote: post #162

zwetan wrote: post #92

About the open source AVM2, there are in total 3 versions: The tamarin project on Mozilla mercurial with tamarin-central [0] and tamarin-redux [1] Then after the project got abandoned, Adobe renamed it to avmplus and moved it to github [2] and made a couple updates. Later on, they moved it to another repo [3], updated it on December 2015 to the equivalent of Flash Player v19.0 and updated it again on Mars 2016 to the…

Alchemy also required a per-domain license key to be purchased to unlock various API combinations at runtime. For me this was the biggest shock and definitively a hint that not all was well in flash land. Runtime player licenses were unheard of until then - only the authoring tools cost money. Having to pay up for every swf on every domain certainly put a chilling effect on experimentation around the new APIs.

Adobe removed the need to have license afterwards

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#188

Post by ivm » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

tomelders wrote: post #128

dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

> folly

Small cultural artifacts move humanity in more subtle ways than the utilitarian behemoths mentioned by you.

Weebls Stuff and Rathergood influenced my thinking a lot by introducing 14yo me to absurd. I'm sure less popular creations made in Flash had some effect too.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#189

Post by orionblastar » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #180

orionblastar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did Visual Basic and MS Access programming mostly in the late 1990s. Upscaling to SQL Server when the database grew too large etc. IBM OS/2 had a Parts Workbench that was easier than Visual Basic and Borland had Delphi based on Object Pascal. Ruby on Rails comes close and Python is the new Visual Basic for a new generation of programmers now.

Rails and Python are fine, I've used both of them extensively, but they are no comparison to VB in any way. Sure they're easy enough to use, but it's all 100% pure code. The biggest benefit of VB was the interface was not coded, it was drawn. There's no way to do that with Rails or Python.

That sounds like a startup idea. Make ROR and Python have an IDE as easy to use as the VB IDE.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#190

Post by Alacart » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #168

mattmanser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set. If you wa…

> If you want client persistence, you have localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB.

I really wish that we had a persistent, non-ephemeral web api for local storage. One that has to be manually deleted by the user, searchable by domain, just like a mobile app. It should ask you to allow it just like notifications or webcam usage, and allow you to set a maximum size with a reasonable fallback default. Until we have that, and full support for service worker features, mobile apps will be a necessity for many developers unfortunately.