[mr_johnson22]

Honest question: why did TypeScript succeed while ActionScript 3.0, another ECMAScript-superset language with typing and OOP (and predates TS by a few years), is all but a distant memory? Is it more than just Adobe being a terrible steward of its tech?

With that said, TS is definitely a blessing; I recently had the privilege of migrating to it after having written a hobby project in plain JS, and the difference in usability between the two is night and day. But I can't help but feel that I've seen this all before years ago in AS3.

[throw_m239339]

> Honest question: why did TypeScript succeed while ActionScript 3.0, another ECMAScript-superset language with typing and OOP (and predates TS by a few years), is all but a distant memory? Is it more than just Adobe being a terrible steward of its tech?

Microsoft and Yahoo voted against ES4 adoption at the ECMA committee, cause Microsoft had, what was it called again? Silverlight, Their flash alternative to promote so they weren't interested in improving Javascript in anyway. Due to Microsoft stupidity, carelessness for standards, the web lost a decade of improvements.

Adding insult to injury in that absurd era, Microsoft had its own AS3 implementation called JScript.net before C# became more popular.

I'm surprised nobody ever wrote a book about this saga, it's completely absurd and petty but there are plenty of stories to tell.

[evilduck]

As a former Flash/Air/Flex dev way back in the day I agree, AS3 was a great language that JavaScript still hasn't fully caught up with in some ways but it was only really viable to author ActionScript within Adobe's endorsed editors and their Eclipse fork abomination. Being confined to the Flash runtime also made life difficult as a general purpose programming language. It was a rough development experience and no amount of language superiority would ever fix that.

[blackoil]

Wasn't fate of ActionScript strongly tied to Flash? As much as some open source community try, they can't beat the full force of the investment done and talent assembled by Microsoft.

[mejutoco]

IMO the flash runtimes leaked memory and that made them bad for long-running applications.

I remember writing a long-running digital display app and the memory would balloon to the point where we would use a product (mdx/mdm?) to restart the flash player periodically.

[nickm12]

Did ActionScript transpile to Javascript? Regardless of whether it did or not, the ES4 trainwreck is probably a big part of the reason.

[jmull]

I liked AS3 quite a bit, but it was limited to Adobe products. I don’t think it was ever given a chance to make an impact beyond Flash and Air.

[throw_m239339]

Well no it wasn't limited to Flash, since it was supposed to be ES4. This is why ES4 doesn't exist as a standard, Javascript went from ES3 to ES5.

[jmull]

I'm aware of how they were related... AS3 was based on ES4 ideas, and, as the major implementation of ES4, AS3 influenced the evolving direction of ES4. But ES4 was never really finished to the point where everyone who needed to actually agreed on it.

I think MS, who had a browser monopoly at the time, was never going to agree to something that made Adobe Flash more important. It seems crazy now, but at the time it seemed like a real possibility that browsers could end up mere shells for the real internet runtime, Flash Player.

[toastercat]

If you liked AS3, maybe take a look at Haxe.

[quickthrower2]

Maybe it was too early? Compiling stuff to JS came popular after flash died.