On 08/02/2012 23:39, Michael A. Labriola wrote:
I would argue its ubiquity. I don't know any advanced developer that
is excited about HTML/JS as a language. Those of us excited about it
are excited by its ubiquity and the capabilities of the VM, not the
language.
Limitations are sometimes the interesting thing. The strict separation
of data and logic is nowhere as celebrated and natural as in HTML &
JavaScript. Even the representation of data is very, very natural. In
the last year even the semantic web has gained traction. That is in my
opinion a language combination that in its way is unchallenged.
I have spent the last 8 years of my life teaching and trying to get
companies to adopt Flex. I saw it as a revolving door where people
came in and left. Although Adobe willfully ignored it, we already had
a huge problem converting someone new to intermediate. In my
experience, our retention rate was around 15% of people who started
and we had huge problems making the senior architects and developers
in a company want to work with this framework. That in turn made it
difficult to ever get adoption throughout.
The biggest problem for me (and companies I was involved with) was its
quality. There was no way to start low. I rather used minimal components
because a 20kb swf just had a different impact than a 400kb swf. The
"easyness of learning" was in total a smaller problem than the "bad
result". The thinking often went like "Why should I study/use Flex if I
can write this better by myself".
Yep, that's why I think evolutionary change is better than
revolutionary change right now
I agree: We have here a product called flex. If you create a
revolutionary new system it shouldn't be called flex anymore, its
marketing and documentation-wise a bad idea. People who used flex before
will not be able to interact with the code ... generally not preferable.
yours
Martin.