It is a fact, flash is growing fast and the new changes to its scripting language i.e. actionScript3 is the most radical change, being a professional AS2 programmer, I find myself amazed of how much things have changed in the new language, the web is full of articles talking about the transition from AS2 to AS3, Adobe site contains a whole section about this yet I still find the introduced changes a bit of too much!
If I were in Adobe shoes, I would have provided AS2 experts with the same functionality using the existing language and added the new one as well, like they did with director when they introduced javascript in addition to director’s native scripting language “Lingo”.
AS3 offers better OOP practice, ok, I agree, but who said that matters for us web developers? We were happy with the ugly non OOP language we had; it was working well for us and the fact that a new version of flash i.e. CS3 emerged is the single proof of the popularity of this program and what it offered to the web.
Wherever you go, you see the fuss about classes, packages, cryptic error codes and more of the like, my guess is that AS3 wont be accepted by flash developers as fast as Adobe wish, I know I am not accepting it and wont do commercial jobs using it, no sir, I will stick to my good old AS2 and wait till adobe finish the upgrades and add the new beta features like high definition video and audio support (btw, work on flash player 10 is in its last stages, and words about flash CS4 with a set of new features is also spreading in the flash community), with the rate things are moving at, I guess I wont have time to play with CS3 since by the time I decide to dive in it, CS4 will probably be out and running…
More on this in the coming few days.