Bracket Creep
Well, last week I was back doing some Flash programming, creating an on-line game for one of our corporate clients.
I must say that Flash’s Action Script 3 is a much better way to do this kind of work than the old days of AS2 (yeah, I know that is a long while ago now, but I’m old and I’ve been working in Flash since Flash 4, so I still think of AS3 as new).
But I do find the problem with moving between all of these C-like languages is keeping them all straight in my head, they are all so similar these days. So similar that it’s really easy to forget the differences until you are brought up short by something going wrong. With luck, this will occur at compile time. If you’re not so lucky, it will happen at run time, in certain circumstances only.
The languages I’m thinking of are:
- C#
- Action Script 3
- Javascript
- PHP
- Objective C
I program in these languages pretty much all the time (though mostly in C#, and with Objective C very much the newcomer to my experience).
You could also add:
- Java
- …and probably several other languages
They all have essentially the same structures – a switch statement, a for statement or an if-then-else is pretty much identical in them all. It’s as though the whole world had converted to speaking English – but with various regional dialects. And you have to keep straight in your head which country you are in at the moment so you get the dialect right.
So changing from C# back to AS3 requires a fair bit of concentration.
Where they don’t compare, though, is in their respective IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). I should probably be using Flex, rather than Flash, and the Eclipse IDE, which isn’t bad, as the tools inside Flash itself are absolute rubbish. I actually find myself using Dreamweaver as a better AS3 code editor than what is available inside Flash CS3.
The Objective-C IDE on the Mac (XCode) is pretty good, in comparison, but still not a patch on Microsoft’s Visual Studio, in my humble opinion.
Microsoft do a lot of things very poorly, but developer tools they still do extremely well. If only they would stop fiddling with C# and not keep issuing new versions of it, each new version requiring a yet bigger .NET Framework to be downloaded by my end-users. I have to say that I’m yet to spend much coding time using the additional features in C# version 3, such as LINQ, let alone the new features which are planned for C# version 4, out real soon now. Most of the time I still target the .NET Framework 2, which is nice and small. Well, 20 MB is small by today’s standards.
