[trilbyglens]

ActionScript was a terrible language. More complex flash projects were really a hacked together mishmash of things, none of it standard, none of it supported without plugins, and oh, have we all forgotten about the weekly zero-days that flash had?

It might have been more "creative" but that was also due to the fact that it was around at the beginning of the web, when everything was more creative. People had not figured out UI or UX patterns yet at that point, and there was massive wheel reinvention taking place all the time.

Flash was an absolute catastrophe for accessibility at well. A screen reader would just say "Flash movie" as that's all that was actually in the page.

We've had to reinvent a lot of that stuff, true, but we've also gained interoperability, security, and accessibility. I think those are all worthy trade-offs.

[CJefferson]

When I was 12, me and my brother made simple flash games. You could produce something with cool animation, basically functional, in a week or two.

What is the modern replacement for my nephews now? There might be one but I haven't seen it.

[thorin]

I would guess Scratch as that is what schools use, even from 6 years old.

[personalidea]

Scratch maybe or GameSalad?

[est]

> Flash was an absolute catastrophe for accessibility at well

Compared to what? All SVG/canvas/WebGL doesn't solve the problem either.

[noduerme]

AS3 was a gorgeous, concise, incredibly fast, strongly typed ES4/5 language with GPU access and all kinds of native APIs at a time when nothing remotely close to that existed in the browser. I humbly suggest that you never worked with it and/or don't understand what it was capable of.