<RANT>
I had some down time to I decide to play around with fractals, obviously I used flash 9 and tried again to unlearn my bad as2 ways.
After a while I realise my as2 are not bad, it’s just as3 is gay as in awful, not the perfectly ok and good the man-loving kind.
The shame is it comes down to only a few simple flaws :
The IDE tries to correct your “bad” ways for you
onPress and onRelease were productivity shortcuts, not problems, repeat ad infinite
The Compiler messages are mis-leading, come from too simple a perspective, and are often plain wrong.
yes the program has ended early however if you looked 2 characters right you would find an surplus bracket , which I would agrue is a more accurate description.
The internal documentation is awful, it’s lost all the human quality which made the previous flash IDEs stand out from the crowd, it looks like it’s a simple generic poor quality javadoc, plus the examples are so poor to the extreme they often don’t explain the core concepts, classes, functions, or their interactions.
Basically the Flash 9 product has all the hall marks of a rushed product, a false generic programming impostor standing where a truely unique IDE/coding/design product stood before.
There is nothing wrong with strictness, I’ve written 10k+ line programs in flash before, I know the bigger the program the more organisation and structure is required, however there is a flip side to this.
Innovation, creativeness, true learning, and general prototyping fun comes from a freeiness away from UML diagrams, away from meetings, namespaces and all other programming burocracies which have become so prominent in modern programming.
Then after you have completely mastered your domain and the knowledge needed to build the final appilcation, you can continue to build the final product in a strict, tradition software engineering fashion, which is as you should, for any professional appilcation.
My point is by unnecessarily closing the loops/hacks and other simple systems available in actionscript 2, the prototyping, innovation and creative side of flash has become harder, so hard many designers and html coders have given up completely trying, and this is definitely a bad thing and something which will only degrade any final products in flash, even if they run faster,
their’s a good saying in Scotland
You can’t polish a turd, and that’s all you’ll get without creativity…
anyway here’s the fractal