Being human beings, it’s in our nature to wonder about the things to come in the near future. It’s one of the reasons we’re inventing and innovating as we stride along the yellow brick road.
Hence, as an actionscript programmer, I wonder what the future will hold for actionscript. I’m deliberately pointing the arrow at actionscript instead of Flash, for actionscript has undoubtedly outgrown it’s mothers womb. Among the output formats today are not only swf, but also AIRborne, mobile and native desktop applications on multiple operating systems.
So the question is: where will actionscript be in.. say.. 2020? Will it still exist? And in what form? Will we have actionscript 4? Or even 5? Or is 3 robust and professional enough to withstand a decade of innovation?
I for one cannot go past the thought that it will absolutely still be alive (and kicking, for that matter). I think it even might still be actionscript 3. The flash players will continue to have amazing new features with every new major build, but my guess would be that actionscript 3 is powerfull and fast enough to cope with these options. But.. I might very well be wrong.
Now, since all you actionscript developers out there must have these same wonderings, I hereby invite you to comment on this article and share your thougts. I’m very curious for your replies!
Tags: actionscript, as3, future
If you take a look at the history of programming, it’s typically a transition from lower level programming to higher level, platform-independent programming languages.
http://www.scriptol.org/history.php
If this trend continues – programming languages will likely become more advanced, perhaps with more higher or diverged levels, targeting different kinds programmers, designers, managers, etc.
OR – technology will cease to exist after December 2012 and its back to the caves with us ;)
IMHO flash and actionscript probably won’t exist anymore in 2020, as for everything there’s a life and soon or later it is intended to finish.
It mainly depends where the web, the technologies and the devices will be in 2020
I agree with @alessandro that it depends on the technology and devices that will be out in 2020.
Devices in the future will probably move away from the mouse/keyboard and a technology that can work with devices like that will take over. The trouble is you need to have the Flash player on all these devices.
I am hoping that AS will grow even futher and adopt a new class that adds native data integration and database connectivity.
As awesome as it is to allow Flex to connection to any middleware language, I would like to be able to have the option stick to the core language itself. Something like ADO.NET.
It’s hard to say (who would have thought that thousands of developers would suddenly start using Objective-C!!!) But each year the Flash Platform continues to mature and the sites, computers, and devices that we target continues to diversify. I think Macromedia / Adobe have done an excellent job in turning ActionScript from a gotoAndPlay script to a full-fledged development platform. They’ve gotten ahead of the curve by making it easy to develop with virtually the same results across multiple platforms. It would be hard to imagine it vanishing in the next ten years.
As Elvin says, languages seem to be trending higher-level. Perhaps some new paradigm will replace OOP as we know it in the next 10 years.
Perhaps ECMA-based languages will eventually merge into one master language and only the compilers and libraries will vary – after all, C# is in many ways very similar to Flash. It is ECMA-based and generates bytecode which is interpreted by a JIT compiler. I’d personally like to see this happen.
Either way, as long as AS is one of the easiest and fastest ways to create cross-platform content, I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
in 2020, AS10 will run our flying cars and robot maids.
I think Flash and AS (some version) will exist. I don’t think the longevity of technology should be underestimated, even when it’s ill-fitting. 2020 is only about 10 years away, about the same as 2000 is from us now, Flash has not changed as much as you’d think (or may have hoped) in ten years; I still can’t watch a fullscreen animation on a state of the art computer with Flash. Flash still doesn’t have the rendering scalability to compete with native, fully hardware accelerated desktop applications. In fact, we still don’t have GUI elements, like scrollbars, in Flash, that compete on a “scrubbing performance” level with the native GUI HTML and AJAX RIAs enjoy.
Another example, HTML, has far outgrown it’s original Hyper Text Markup Language roots, yet has changed surprisingly little since it’s first draft in 1991 – about twenty years ago.
I think that the raw data behind content will ultimately be absorbed almost entirely by a publish/subscribe network of social, semantic and b2b services; it kind of is already; we can expect a drastic increase in this as the semantic web becomes more of a reality, a.k.a. “web 3.0.” This should always keep the consuming parts on the edge, like Flash, iPhone/mobile, HTML, RSS, social-app-integration, fully employed, for the foreseeable future.
I think there will also be a shift toward full “experience immersive sites” that includes a complete and full merging with the arts and sciences of the 3d video game production and film industries (there already is a bit of this now), thus keeping the envelope always pushing. Video game console level graphics in a webpage, fullscreen or not, on the game consoles or not – all of it. Along side of this all sites will be required to be accessible on everything else as well. So I wouldn’t worry about Flash going away, it will just be part of an expected ecosystem of endpoints. As for AS3, it’s enough for this object-orient nerd and I’d be happy to see it stay unchanged for a while, frankly, I’m tired of buying new books every 6 months. Having said that, I think we’ll see new versions of AS continue and become even more standardized.
I hope it still isn’t ActionScript 3 in ten years. I was very disappointed when AS 4 was put off.