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

So a summary of all these answers would be:

There is little to no information about what Adobes plans are for moving AS3 forward. One would presume that they will follow the ECMA spec, but that in itself is in a bit of political turmoil at the moment, so I guess that Adobe are waiting to see how that all turns out.

As for the language becoming simpler, as in easier understand for part-time/utilitarian programmers. This seems unlikely as Flex is aiming to win over people from Java, and so, one would presume that AS will continue to aim to make Java programmers feel comfortable.

Separating designers from the code completely using Thermo/Flash Catalyst seems the most likely future for the Programmer/Designer relationship on Flash development teams.

The Haxe team are doing their bit to make working with the Flash Player a more expressive and less restrictive experience. But, as far as I know, they are not receiving support from Adobe. So it seems like Adobe are not interested in seeing more language choice for Flash Player developers.

Silverlight could give a significant scare to Adobe and force it to make AS a more expressive/professional language, if it manages to approach the market coverage of the Flash Player Plugin. As Silverlight apps can be developed in a powerful and professional IDE, Visual Studio (as opposed to the basic Flex Builder Plugin). And C# is the language of choice, which makes AS3 looks quite limited in a lot of areas.

All in all Adobe are tight lipped about the future of AS3 and the process for growing the language takes place behind closed doors. So in finishing, only Adobe can really answer the question, of where is AS3 going?