[captainmuon]

HTML+JS is "turing complete" so in a sense you can make everything in HTML that you could make in Flash.

In practice, I think the authoring experience has been lost. There is still Adobe Animate (which is the renamed Flash application), but I think you can not export to a fully interactive HTML application - only to static videos or simple HTML (like interactive ads). Maybe it is now possible, but I haven't seen much use of it.

The magic of Flash started with a very nice vector editor - it even allowed you to "paint" Vectors with a brush. Then you had very intuitive tools for animations (tweening, onion shells). You could add simple interaction from the GUI. But it was easy to run custom ActionScript (basically JS) code on events, and move objects around on the screen. When you needed more control, you could also completely go to the ActionScript level and create your objects from code.

Nowadays, what do you use to create animations? After Effects seems what a lot of people use but it is overkill. Animate seems to be barely maintained. And if you want to do a game? I think Unity & co. have taken over, but they lack a bit the low barrier to entry that Flash had.

[josefx]

> HTML+JS is "turing complete" so in a sense you can make everything in HTML that you could make in Flash.

I love how turing complete gets thrown around every time. Can a turing machine by itself run a voice chat, print documents, display images, stream videos? If I emulated a turing machine on a 1 Hz CPU would it be capable of decoding a 4k video stream in acceptable time?

[captainmuon]

Jeez, I knew people would comment on this. I put it in quotes because I don't mean turing complete it in the technical sense, but as an analogy. It is "fully functional", you can achive basically any result that you can with Flash. Analogous to the fact that a Turing complete system can simulate any Turing machine, I mean a certain interactive graphical programming environment - like HTML5+js for example - can remake any Flash game.

But that "Turing completeness" or "result achiveability" is not at all the interesing point.

The point is that despite this "completeness" or "equivalency" there is a difference. You could write a line of business application in plain C or say even FORTH, but it is probably easier and makes more sense in C# or Java. And you can create great games and animations in HTML+JS, but something was lost in the experience, and in the tooling, that was available with Flash.

[andrewflnr]

For future reference, the relatively casual term you want here is "Pacman-complete". :)

[billpg]

When I was reading about Turing Completeness as a child, I remarked to my mother that "Computers can do anything". She quickly told me that wasn't right. I went back and thought about what I actually meant. My revised statement was "Computers can do anything that computers can do", which sounds significantly less grand.

[kytazo]

> My revised statement was "Computers can do anything that computers can do", which sounds significantly less grand.

Unless they're quantum computers where they may as well create a wormhole or something https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711

[Dylan16807]

> turing complete

The question is what you can do, not what can you write a function to calculate.

[hutzlibu]

"but I think you can not export to a fully interactive HTML application"

You can, with the help of integrated EaselJS. But it is way more complicated, so I also never used it and I don't know if anyone is using it at all.

And yes, the ease of flash is gone. This was the most appealing of it.