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Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

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Re: Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

#31

Post by astrodust »

cpeterso wrote: post #27

For some perspective, the Flash Player code base is almost 20 years old and must maintain binary compatibility with ancient content (because many websites have binary .swf files without the .fla source files). Flash is likely the world's most installed software when you consider that most Windows and Mac and Android devices have Flash.

Adobe Flash, formerly Macromedia Flash, formerly a vector-based font-authoring tool rejigged into an animation system called FutureSplash.

It's no wonder the thing is so jammed full of fossilized code. Legacy platform support. Legacy plugin support. The whole thing is a museum of bad ideas and shoddy implementations done by people who no longer work for companies that don't even exist.

It was wildly successful, beating out even its brother Director slash ShockWave, which is an admirable achievement, yet did not come without a cost. Like Windows its success has saddled it with an enormous base of users and developers to keep content.

Re: Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

#32

Post by phase_9 »

pixie_ wrote: post #17

I still like ActionScript because I like javascript, but in many cases I want to declare my types so I can get type checks at compile time instead of being surprised or having to write unit tests to be sure of myself. Also refactoring large javascript or python projects is my nightmare because getting it to 'compile' means nothing, so many bugs could be lurking still.

Reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/#!/dozba/status/198081985506328576. Seriously, put the effort in to learn a unit testing framework (Qunit) and a mocking framework (SinonJS) and use them. You'll find that refactoring your large dynamic projects no longer involves blindly 'changing shit'.

Re: Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

#33

Post by ch0wn »

josefonseca wrote: post #22

Shouldn't the title be Reaching the limits of Adobe Flash Stupidity? You couldn't say the same about the Photoshop team, IMO.

There is this old rant about the PSD file format, which I was instantly reminded of when reading the article:

http://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/XeePhotoshopLoade...

Re: Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

#36

Post by viraptor »

pilif wrote: post #30

This is just a subjective feeling, but back in the 90ies, everyone seems to have been producing code with only one goal in mind: have the compiled output work well enough so it can be shipped. There was next to no automated testing, there was some theoretical best practice, but at least in the windows world nobody cared. Heck, back in the days there weren't even multiple accounts on a machine, nor were there file sys…

Actually they did change the before in a not backwards compatible way at least two times (IIRC), so there should not be much pain in doing that again... At least from the updates/compatibility preserving point of view they have it sorted.

Re: Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

#37

Post by pilif »

viraptor wrote: post #36
pilif wrote: post #30

This is just a subjective feeling, but back in the 90ies, everyone seems to have been producing code with only one goal in mind: have the compiled output work well enough so it can be shipped. There was next to no automated testing, there was some theoretical best practice, but at least in the windows world nobody cared. Heck, back in the days there weren't even multiple accounts on a machine, nor were there file sys…

Actually they did change the before in a not backwards compatible way at least two times (IIRC), so there should not be much pain in doing that again... At least from the updates/compatibility preserving point of view they have it sorted.

Can you point to a link describing this? As far as I remember they were still bundling the old runtime and feeding older code through the older runtimes.

Re: Reaching the Limits of Adobe Stupidity

#38

Post by viraptor »

pilif wrote: post #37
viraptor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they did change the before in a not backwards compatible way at least two times (IIRC), so there should not be much pain in doing that again... At least from the updates/compatibility preserving point of view they have it sorted.

Can you point to a link describing this? As far as I remember they were still bundling the old runtime and feeding older code through the older runtimes.

Yes, I think that's correct, but I don't know the details of how was it done. The point was that they have done this before and the new design isn't that old actually.
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