Moving AS3 forward?

Question

Hi I use AS3 quite a lot for work, but I come from a Java/C/C++ education and find the language quite restrictive.

There seems to be two fundamental camps in the AS3 wor

Answer 1

I tend to disagree since I quite like the language. One thing we need to realize is that some of the features that the technical crowd want are VM features and not language features (e.g. threading).

The language needs to be developer friendly and not artist friendly now. Flash has moved a long way from site-intros, vector cartoons, ad banners and simple games. Most often in my day-to-day work it is being used to build custom in-house applications. These have completely different constraints and necessitate the language features introduced in AS3 (e.g. namespaces, strong typing). I've worked on teams of 9+ developers. Javascript isn't meant to handle such large scale developments - which is why Google uses GWT to enable them to write Java code that compiles to Javascript.

There were certainly some features of ES4 that I was very excited about. For example generic functions (basically method overloading), parameterized types (basically generics), generators (using yield) and the let, type, like, unit and wrap keywords. I was and am disappointed it was killed in favour of the watered down ES3.1/ES5 spec (I believe this was more political than technical). I hope Adobe has the strength of vision needed to implement that spec as AS4.