The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code • Hacker News Board

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#61

Post by ralusek » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #44

lkrubner wrote: post #6

Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got st…

The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course. Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.

ActionScript 3 was definitely not less friendly, it just wasn't ActionScript 2. One of the most unfriendly things about ActionScript 2 was that it was just so different from other programming languages, and not in a good way.

I actually was taking programming classes at the time, and they were all in Java. Almost every concept translated directly from Java to AS3. In fact, AS3 is actually a sister language to modern JavaScript, as it was simply an implementation of ECMAScript with actual classes and optional type system.

AS2 was instead a very strange and inconsistent language, where having a question answered in another language was unlikely to conceptually port over.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#62

Post by shove » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #43

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.

Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's that I remember Flash taking off. My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.

Flash player plugin had 90+% browser penetration by the late 90s but yeah, the corporate money really started flowing around 2000.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#63

Post by teilo » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC

joemanaco wrote: post #59

1.4M Lines of Code in a very high level language? What the hell are they doing?

They wrote this codebase in Flash, meaning ActionScript, the only real option at the time they were developing these games. The effort to rewrite the entire codebase in something completely different, all while still running a profitable company, in time to beat the EOL for Flash, all while still maintaining a legacy code base, was a non-starter. Now they have a multi-platform code base, and a non-deprecated path forward. What they did is utterly rational from an ROI standpoint.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#64

Post by CaptSpify » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:28 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #36

desireekdlo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On th…

Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had c…

That's the official reason. I've long suspected that the real reason he didn't want flash was because it would cut into app-store revenue.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#65

Post by jack9 » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:29 PM UTC

The article is describing an event that has been covered a couple ways. It was also the basis for a presentation at the 2017 Seattle Casual Connect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o

I was one of those who asked some questions at the end.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#66

Post by jack9 » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:30 PM UTC

jmull wrote: post #29

kennu wrote: post #11

I found the article confusing at first, because they said they discarded HTML5 as an option but in fact ended up using Haxe to generate HTML5. The explanation is that they wanted a desktop-first, multi-platform solution that is able to generate both HTML5 and iOS/Android native code. Quite interesting, as I didn't know you can use Haxe to achieve this. I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar plat…

Yes, that bothered me too. They called that option “HTML5”, but they meant something more like native JavaScript & HTML.

Accessing HTML5 features is usually by javascript api. Even if you used another dependency, how would that help?

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#67

Post by shove » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #28

So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?

Few remember, but Adobe tried to submit a variant of ActionScript 3 as an ECMAScript candidate but the open web folks were dubious and it went nowhere.

That's not the same thing as open-sourcing the Flash authoring tool, but they still sell the modern variant Animate.

They could open source the player, but why bother -- the browser vendors have basically shut the gates. The swf file spec is pretty well documented but the player architecture doesn't map well to 2d canvas performance wise and is nearly a complete impedance mismatch for webgl.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#68

Post by shove » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:35 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #48

This article is confusing, and sounds confused, but I feel like a lot of problems like this could be solved by Adobe open sourcing the Flash Player. If they did this, we would have a complete, correct view of how each and every feature in the Player was implemented, and a working implementation to compare to. In the sense that there is so much art locked away in SWF blobs which don't quite work with gnash or shumway.…

You're confusing the Flash player (no xtras) and Director a bit here.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#69

Post by tigershark » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:36 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #26

I think the final legacy of Flash will be the knowledge that this was the first major piece of software locked out of a platform and we lost a lot of the history of the internet with its demise. As much as Flash was a pain, I'm not sure I like the idea that it is acceptable for Apple or anyone else to keep that software off their platform. I wonder if someone comes up with the next step after the web will it even be…

Seriously? For what reason Apple should have been forced to support in his platform something sluggish, buggy and full of extremely serious security problem? I really can't understand your rationale.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#70

Post by Decade » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #43

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.

Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's that I remember Flash taking off. My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.

In my recollection, Java was pushed into browsers as part of Sun’s Write Once Run Anywhere strategy. Browser makers went along because it was the era when everybody wanted to be a platform for plugins. Then Microsoft tried to control the development of Java on Windows, and that was a mess.

The Java plugin was a pain. The runtime took somewhere on the order of 10 seconds to load, and the browser was completely unresponsive during this time. This was also the era before CSS, so if you wanted animated buttons on your web site, you had to use Java. Imagine loading a page, and then seeing a column of gray rectangles that freeze your browser and eventually resolve into dithered (“web-safe” color) buttons. Not a great experience.

Real Media only played video and audio. QuickTime played video and audio and VR snapshots. There were also plugins for specific types of content like VRML.

I feel that Flash took off because Adobe spent lots of money pushing it everywhere, but also because it ran better than Java. The runtime was smaller to download than Java, it started up much faster than Java, and its vector animations played very smoothly compared to the alternatives of the time.