Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by blueboo on Sunday October 13, 2019 @06:54PM (#21243808)

ah yes, the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device...

...perhaps you mean the countless drag-and-drop code-free frameworks that enable people to create apps without writing code? Or that a basic Swift tutorial to do just that takes about 15 minutes, including downloading Xcode? I just can't understand this confused nostalgia.

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by dTal on Sunday October 13, 2019 @07:35PM (#21244057)

Embedded device? It's a handheld unix computer.

Ironically, actual embedded devices are far easier to program, with Arduino. You type your code in a window (with all boilerplate and build system abstracted away) and click a button, and boom it's compiled and uploaded and running. This is because it was designed to be easy to use - ostensibly to teach young people, but in practice it means lots of hackers use it too.

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by detaro on Sunday October 13, 2019 @07:37PM (#21244069)

It's not the default, but you can have that kind of experience with various toolkits for mobile devices too. I've seen workshops which kids left after an afternoon with their own simple "game" deployed to their phones.

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by blueboo on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @04:06PM (#21274884)

And every Arduino-like platform there are dozen Processing, Scratch, myriad drag-and-drop app builders...

Yep, it's never been easier

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by heavyset_go on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:22PM (#21244279)

There is a lot of legacy from the age of "the hardware can barely run it, but we're sticking a Unix with a graphics system on it anyway"

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by buboard on Sunday October 13, 2019 @07:03PM (#21243858)

> the famous "intrinsic simplicity" of writing, compiling, and deploying an app to an embedded device.

90% of apps can be replicated as web pages, which are far, far easier to program and deploy. Frameworks do add a lot needless of complexity for little benefit. The reason is not a "test of worthiness" though - the purpose is developer lock-in and make it as much difficult as possible to switch to the competing platform. The only way to win this game is not to play

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by thrower123 on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:23PM (#21244288)

Why designing most mobile apps should be harder than slamming together VB6 form applications is something that is not entirely clear to me.

Although when people start arguing that programming a web page is easy, it really brings home how awful modern programming is, and how long it has been since there was widespread usage of really decent and simple RAD tooling.

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by pjmlp on Monday October 14, 2019 @01:11AM (#21245417)

It gets close enough if one just focus on one platform.

Or if one shells out to Delphi, RemObjects, Xamarin, Qt.

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Re:Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era by Osiris on Sunday October 13, 2019 @07:41PM (#21244090)

My company has been using expo for mobile development because you can build a React app and expo does all the work to make it work on Android and iOS. It's not perfect but since we're doing React for the web app, it's allowed web devs to become mobile devs with almost no additional training.

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