The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming?Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got started back in 1995.Look at what happened on the Web between 2005 and 2015, where we transitioned from using HTML/CSS to instead building systems with React/Relay or Angular or Vue.Especially since 2005, it’s unclear that we gained much — the old system gave us Google Maps and Gmail and a lot of great online software, none of which seems obviously worse than the kind of software being created today. And, contrariwise, the biggest missing piece in 2005, a good Open Source tool for animation to replace Flash, is still missing now. What do we do nowadays when we want to mix images, sound and video in an interactive interface? We can build these sites with complex Javascript, though we are still missing a good authoring tool to match what Flash used to have — in particular a tool that allows people with little skill to do a great deal. Using React/Relay/GraphQL requires a tremendous amount of skill.(There also used to be the argument, put forward by folks like Phillip Greenspun, that Flash did not belong on the Web, because the Web was fundamentally about text and images and HTML. I read Greenspun’s book in 1998, and I strongly agreed with him then and for many years following, but we have to admit that debate is now long dead, along with ideas such as semantic pages. The way people use Javascript now is in the spirit that Flash was once used.)http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-h...