Hello Eric, Carlos and list, Personal and technological problems have kept me from being active an i think this is a good point to share my thoughts and experiences after a half a year off this list:
I work at a company now that still has a reasonable amount of "Flash" work left. However I have hardly touched a line of As 3 in the past months. And I don't regret it. Yes: browsers and html are messy(still, a lot) and having to know things like Date.now() breaks on IE is annoying but there are so many things that are just nice in the html world that I don't want to switch back to Fl(ex/ash). 1) I love the command line and there is none easily combined with flex. I would need to run(red) tamarin or some other- horribly complex tool to get to a decent cmd line. Nodejs handles compilation well. 2) happy language hacking. JavaScript is awesome: why? You ask. Well: because I don't need to write it. I write in CoffeeScript, Dart, Haxe etc. they contain a lot of interesting language design choices that animate me to try things out. 3) deployment. I started with ant, struggled with maven, learned with gradle and mastered with build scripts and have decided: cake rocks. I have never been able to write such detailed, easy to setup scripts as I gave with CoffeeScript and nodejs. What a difference to how damn unnecessary hard it is to deploy with flex... 4) I don't want to write unit tests for software others wrote. I love to see tests run. It's satisfying. What is not satisfying is writing tests for other persons code just to makes sure they do what I think they do. The (not existing) testing system of flex drove me to the leave. Having mustella doesn't make me want to come back. 5) Aim. What do I need flex for? The flash apps developed at this company will not get better with flex, everyone uses their own libraries and flex just doesn't play we'll together with other kids on the block. I can't use a part without feeling its all unnecessarily intertwined. When I developed my first open source library years ago it was already a buck load of work to separate it properly and it had a fraction of the size of what flex is now. The reason I point at this is because once its separated I could easily change focus or intent of the parts and was able to talk about them independently. I could plan release in small cycles or change the direction of the modules easily. Today Aim of flex seems too much to preserve what's here in contrast to make the world awesome. I want make the world awesome... I don't think I can do that by supporting flex. To me open source is about things I can be passionate about. I can't be passionate about flex anymore. It's slow, uncomfortable and fixed on flash at the moment. Yours Martin Heidegger
