[sjs]

A couple of months ago I was looking at Flex. It's a complete nightmare to try and play around with. I downloaded the SDK and tried to make some kind of hello world thing but just trying to make a module with a single function and then call that function was not straightforward at all. I didn't even want a module but I have to have one. Fine. How do I make one? The docs don't even cover this sort of thing. There is basically no tutorial or documentation I could find that told me how to do this. I gave up.

Oh, and that was after I had to add manifest types everywhere like I was writing Java, without a free IDE to complete that junk for me. All the docs I found assumed you have the Flex IDE or Flash Builder whatever it is. Which costs over $500. Apparently it's still 1995 at Adobe Inc.

And people say Haskell is hard to use. I had no trouble getting started with Haskell. `ghci<return>` and away you go.

(I'd like to think that it wasn't my fault. Maybe I'm not as capable as I think I am, but I have written compilers and interpreters in C, Haskell, and Lisp. I have written an x86 assembler in Ruby that emits real x86 machine code as Mach-O binaries. I can write hello world in at least 10 languages. I feel like I have the capacity to understand this stuff. Hello world with an existing compiler should be a piece of cake, not an exercise in frustration.)

edit: Ok, I searched for "flex hello world" and did find something that looks like what I want. I deleted Flex and can't try to run it now though. Still don't like all the complexity but it does look like what I said I couldn't find: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=02_G...

[Erwin]

With no Flash experience I had no trouble building a few Flex apps, and it was the same for a team member that quickly build a performant Flex app using their table widgets (which kills something like jQuery data tables plugin even on Chrome).

I did read O'Reilly's Flex book first though. I'm not sure people code Flex for fun, so good documentation costs money.

Was this your first time writing code for a GUI toolkit? Flex has an interesting model that merges XML definition of a UI with module-based code. I don't find it particular complex compared to say, writing an MFC application or C Win32 code to write a UI. I actually prefer it to the jungle of HTML, CSS, JS and dozens of JS libraries which aren't really geared for a professional type UI and fall down when you want to display 10,000 items in your table.

[sjs]

Not my first GUI code. I've done lots of web development in the past 15 years. Front and back. I've written an OS X app, several iOS apps including some universal ones, a few Android apps, a few webOS apps, and one Windows Phone 7 app. In a previous life I made games and utilities with Visual Basic and played around with Gtk+ in C (but quickly ran away).

[talmand]

I've never used Flex in my Flash projects, I just use straight AS3 with FlashDevelop. Requires the Flex SDK to compile but none of the code.

You do not need to purchase anything from Adobe to compile a AS3 project.

edit: I don't mean for this post to be as negative sounding as it may appear, it's not a comment on your abilities.