WOW AS3 is so much Faster

i think that the switch from as2 to as3 needs big time, as it needs to learn as2 when you never used flash. I started one year ago with as3 and i got really pissed, but when i came back to as2 i found that i was coding following the as3 way of thinking, because it was much more effective: my coding had almost no mistakes once i had the initial release of my application finished.

Our degree of abstraction has a limit. Classes separate every single part of the program, so you can improve at maximum each part.

And yes, there are things that are annoying. In this cases I like to think that the annoying things are there for any of the reasons (speed, flexibility, error avoiding), So i considerer it as the tip.

You can always create your custom classes to simplify your day to day. In AS3 you know that you won't have much trouble.

It does have some good new features and the speed improvement is great. But after that we differ.

It may be better structured, but it is not simpler! There are so many classes and so many of them rely on multiple, multiple levels of inheritance. And simple things like the name of a file to load is now a URLRequest and so on add levels of complexity that are not really necessary for small projects.

The documentation is lousy. In previous versions every (or nearly every) constructor, method, property, and event had a code example. The lack of the same for AS3, is not helpful for folks who are quite familiar with AS2 (that would be me!) and trying to switch over to AS3.

As you know I believe the lack of any syntax checking for AS3 is also a big minus. It is really annoying to have to compile a swf to find simple typos and other errors that should be found by a syntax check.

If the goal is to encourage structure and planning in the code, there are many things that don't make it easy for those who are new to AS3.

it has more good features.

- much powerful (computespectrum, loader, ...)
- much simpler and better structured (not easier if you are not used to code in standard programming languages like C or java)
- it gives you a lot more of compiling/runtime errors (this is really good, since it prevents you from making mistakes). When you publish your movie it is much more robust and consistent than with AS2.

This is certainly the single biggest plus I can see in Flash CS3 right now (and the only reason I would currently recommend to a client for publishing to FP9).

thanks for taking your time :) I appreciate having real numbers.