[tombert]

Heck yeah.

I've said it a million times, but I stand by Flash being the most fun development environment ever made.

Being able to draw your cartoons, make them a movie clip, export to code, edit things around without having to re-count all the frames, built in hit-detection, etc. It's a blast to write software for Flash, and I am not sure I've ever had more fun than being a teenager developing Flash games in my bedroom with a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro (or was it Flash 8? I can't remember).

Now, I'll admit that part of that was because I was a teenager at the time, and programming was still a cool novel thing to me, but I do think that the platform was uniquely fun and interactive, and I have been chasing that high for awhile without being able to find something to fully replace it. Stuff like Construct and GameMaker and stuff are pretty cool and fun, but they still don't really hit the same for me that Flash did.

If we can have a new Flash, I will be very happy.

[moolcool]

I think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.

[idreyn]

Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.

[tombert]

Well said, and I completely agree.

Since Flash was an animation-first piece of software that still had a fairly robust scripting system, it was able to create very unique and interesting pieces of media that can kind of only exist as they are.

People aren't making full on TV cartoons in Construct or GameMaker. This isn't a dig at those tools, they're good software, but the animation parts of them are targeted much more towards "animation for games".

[KaiserPro]

From what I recall part of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386224/ was animated in flash, if not all.

[tombert]

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.

If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.

If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.

[fenomas]

They would have if they could have - answered here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256093

[KaiserPro]

It was a power play between apple and Adobe.

The iphone was underpowered, and apple decided that they could brazen their way out of not having flash support.

It turned into a movement, but that was never a given.

[odo1242]

There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

[tombert]

Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.

If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossBridge

[DonHopkins]

ESR's "many eyes" quote in his "Linus's Law" is unmitigated bullshit. And Linux Torvalds should not be blamed for it, since it wasn't his law, ESR just named it after him to get attention. Hardly anyone actually reads code, and the few people actually qualified to find bugs by reading huge piles of buggy code dumped into the public domain when a company abandons it have much more important things to do with their time.

If the many eyes that Macromedia and Adobe paid to work full time on Flash couldn't prevent the need to push out Flash security patches several times a week, the code is fundamentally flawed far beyond the point that the few much less qualified people who might actually take their unpaid spare time to look at it are able to finally find and fix all the bugs.

The major browser developers have enough on their hands designing new open standards and writing and debugging new code, without having to spend any of their time burning their eyes and brains looking at free abandoned obsolete toxic waste code dumps. And ESR certainly isn't going to chip in and help them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133598

>He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided.

>About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5]

>The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[6][7][8][9] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[8] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.[10]

>Empirical support of the validity of Linus's law[11] was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organization. Popular projects are projects with the top 5% of GitHub stars (7,481 stars or more). Bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, the ratio of commits determined to be related to fixing bugs. The analysis showed that popular projects had a higher ratio of bug fixes (e.g., Google's popular projects had a 27% higher bug fix rate than Google's less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its code quality standards in more popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.

[tombert]

Man you really took issue with a small part of what I said.

Writing forty paragraphs about your opinion of the “many eyes” thing is interesting enough, but I stand by what I said. If Flash player had been FOSS I think it could have been integrated into browser standards and you’d have browser makers able to fix things and integrate better sandboxing since it could be part of the standard.

[matja]

I think it is still more likely that a project can be improved if everyone has access to the source code vs not having access to any source code. Are there counterexamples to that?

[dwighttk]

I enjoyed flash games… even made one with some friends.

I hated flash only for their video player being so widespread despite immediately redlining my Mac’s cpu and holding it there during the entire experience.

(Okay also security issues, but that was more like adding the ammunition to getting rid of the video player)

[Brajeshwar]

I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.

Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”

So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.

Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/

[tombert]

Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.

But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.

I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.

[pjmlp]

I disagree with it being the most fun, because I would also consider TP/Delphi and C++ Builder.

Now I do agree that even something like Unity or PlayCanvas fail short of Flash's game development experience, because the browser debugging for 2D and 3D development sucks.

[tombert]

I have heard lovely things about Delphi’s and C++ builder’s fun factor (maybe from you on this very forum actually :) ), but I have not used those so I cannot speak to it.

At least of the stuff I have used, Flash is the most fun. Admittedly I never really got into any other kind of graphics-first development like VisualBasic and the like. Flash just spoke to me for some reason.

[matula]

> a pirated copy of Flash MX 2004 Pro...

This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.

Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.

[casey2]

It's just selling a scam. I've never been impressed by a flash game, but I'm impressed by programs written in general languages daily and for longer than flash has existed.

The worst thing about tech is people who don't know any better get advertised tools that aren't sustainable and aren't suited to the job. If someone sees a flash game and says "WOW! that's so cool I wanna do that", then I don't have problem with it. But if people want to learn a language and are handed an SRS app, or want to make a unique game and are told to use an engine that's when it becomes harmful (and in many cases viral due to network effects)

[tombert]

I gotta admit I don't really know what you're talking about.

I think Flash was fun to develop in. It was easy and fun to write a game in it and it was something a lot more approachable and easier to distribute than trying to cobble together something with OpenGL or DirectX.

Also, I think a lot of the games on Flash actually are fun. I played through Mystery of Time and Space a few months ago and it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the jokes are funny, the art is likeable, it's a good game.

But what I liked about Flash was that, because it was so approachable, there was a lot of creativity to stuff. A lot of the games weren't good in any kind of "objective" sense, but there was at least a distinct lack of cynicism with a lot of them. The people who made the games weren't doing it for money, they were doing it because they thought it would be cool to make a game. Some games, like Pico's School for example, were unlike basically anything that had come before it. Is Pico's School a masterpiece of game design? Nah, but it's certainly unique, and it was something that could be played on pretty much anyone's computer.

[wisemang]

Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.

[edit] well that wasn't hard to find: https://www.numuki.com/game/singing-horses/

Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.

[Nekorosu]

That's absurd.

[ajkjk]

a "scam"? really? I don't think there's one person who used flash and felt scammed somehow.