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Top five misperceptions about ActionScript 3

I find it amusing how often I see posts trying to get people to move over to ActionScript 3 from ActionScript 2. It's almost in the same spirit as moving from XP to Vista. There is these need for companies to create the next version and update. It's part of the capitalist system, and I think this is the backlash. We get comfortable using a particular version of software and do not feel a compelling reason to make the movement to the next version. And how many of these new options or features are imperative for what we are accomplishing.

In this post, the argument is laid out for why we should make the movement to AS3. I do want to preface my remarks with saying that I now do most of my Flash programming with AS3, but it wasn't an easy transition. I had grown accustomed to the nuisances of AS2 and every functionality required relearning the "new" way of doing it. Sure, it is more convenient on the most part once you start to see the logic of the programming changes. But the transition is not easy, not getting around it. There are still a number of things I cannot figure out how to do in AS3, that I did regulary in AS2.

AS3 is as hard to learn any programming language. It's certainly not hard for someone with previous experience. But if you are new to it, it is difficult to learn. I still am trying to understand the understand when to use prrivate or public variable. It often feels that do it right you should not use the timeline anymore because of the difficulty to find the code. There is a programmer's arrogance that looks down on people who still put code on the timeline and don't use the object oriented nature of the language. In a school environment, many computer do not have newest versions of Flash player, and you cannot target Flash 9 in all cases. I don't know where they get this 98.6%. This seems like a bogus statistic to me, something from a marketing brochure. I know at the high school I work at, most computers do not have the newest Flash Player. And I clearly can't say that AS2 development is faster or slower than one another. I would say all programming takes time and seems to me you have to type more in AS3 than AS2, but the debugging time is more convenient due to the need to follow stricter rules.

I think Adobe or whoever keeps posting these transition articles should relax a little. There is no reason to move to the next version of anything until a compelling reason