[incrudible]

> annoying flash ads

Thank god that is a thing of the past, right?

In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

[diggan]

ActionScript and JavaScript are basically the same language, considering the roots of them both and that they share 99% of the syntax and functionality, ActionScript being a "lite" version of JavaScript. They're definitely more similar than they are different.

The only major difference (which is incidentally also probably why JS "won") was that JS came from development that happened out in the open, as FOSS, while ActionScript was a proprietary language from a company.

[adrian17]

AS3 derives from the ES4 proposal, which honestly felt like a bigger shift than Python2->3 transition. In fact, AS3 came out after work on ES4 already ceased, so in my understanding, "the JS we know today" won even before AS3 came out.

Also referring to Brendan Eich's comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25388721 :

> When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.

[incrudible]

Not accurate, look up ActionScript 3 and the ECMAScript 4 kerfuffle.

[diggan]

What do you mean is not accurate?

[tracker1]

Since Typescript is largely borrowed from bits of ActionScript/ES4, people aren't missing much at all. TS+React isn't too different from AS3+Flex.

[incrudible]

The associated headaches with tooling and configuration do make it quite different.

[tracker1]

I haven't had meat as much odor with vite or parcel. Let alone Deno or bun.