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Jabberwocky In ActionScript
VeryVito writes "You can tell Flash programming is beginning to grow up: It's not just for designers anymore, but for real, honest-to-goodness tech geeks. As evidence, I present The ActionScript Jabberwocky. Enjoy!" It's almost as good as reading it in the original Klingon.
Lewis Carroll
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought--
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
/cj
I personally think that most Perl Poetry is far more interesting and original.
There are still some rubes in non-tech industries that load up on Flash crap, but isn't Flash mostly an anachronism these days?
Uh, no. What makes you think that? Flash is *everywhere*. Hell, even Slashdot show Flash ads.
So the player isn't open source. Big deal. Macromedia provide specs so you can write your own player and embrace it.
Because MM ignored Linux, I ignored Flash for two years after having finished some large projects with it (and thus noticed it's shortcomings), but earlier this year a client aproached me with a large Flash / ActionScript job and after looking into it I took the challange. /., it is a powerfull technology with some very cool and unique features. And it's powerfull VM is *very* small by modern standards. Due to the fact that Flashers usually can't programm very well it isn't catching on that good, but I expect Flash/AS 2 to gain serious foothold in other territories than 'flashy websites' very soon. Ming and Xical, for instance, are good examples for serious OSS projects using Flash/ActionScript.
The MM Flash IDE is as crappy as ever, but ActionScript 2 is a full range PL, very similar to Java. With proper exception handling, OOP and all that stuff.
as. files can be imported and compiled in meaning you don't have to use MMs shoddy AS editor anymore. Despite the utter crap that's said about AS and Flash on
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Flash has grown up. What it represents (to me) is a potentially really solid thin client for building remote applications.
Why not use Java? Well compare the amount and quality of flash games to java games, that's my metric for my belief that at least for gaming, that flash is probably a better dev environment.
But the huge problem right now is the lack of quality documentation/tutorials/books on actionscript 2.0 (released last november). It's not completely backwards compatible. Most of the books are oriented towards dumbasses, and they are just actionscript 1.0 books with the code tweaked so it works on 2.0 (i.e. not OOPy).
If anyone has a good recommendation in terms of actionscript 2.0 books, I'd appreciate it. I have this one, which is a good book, but is very oriented towards AS1.0 programmers moving to AS2.0. It's hard to find a book that is geek friendly, example oriented, and designed from scratch for actionscript 2.0.
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I support spreading santorum
All the Flash-bashing on Slashdot has got to stop. Macromedia has done an outstanding job with Flash. They developed an extremely efficient file format (take a look at the SWF file format specification, it's truly beautiful), they opened it for everyone to use. They developed a powerful language, that, although of course interpreted, compiles into something as close to a binary as you can get. Yes, their IDE costs money, and there's no native linux version, but i see people who paid money for MSVS bitch about it, and i dont have to explain the irony here. And as far as a native linux version, well, that is for the same reasons that no other major company ported their software, because not enough people would buy it. So, please, stop harping on it so much, it's a result of many people's hard work and cudos to them for making it so popular.