This is just a subjective feeling, but back in the 90ies, everyone seems to have been producing code with only one goal in mind: have the compiled output work well enough so it can be shipped.<p>There was next to no automated testing, there was some theoretical best practice, but at least in the windows world nobody cared. Heck, back in the days there weren't even multiple accounts on a machine, nor were there file system permissions for example.<p>Of course, those old days are long gone by now, but software surviving from back then (like Flash Player) still has this legacy.<p>As an aside: when it initially came out, Flash Player was called ShockWave Flash (.swf - ring a bell?). Flash was this lighter, simpler (and cheaper) version of the Shockwave authoring system.<p>At some point it superseded it in features though.<p>Some of this old Software can be rewritten, but most of it is still being depended on by independent third parties which require the mess to be bug for bug compatible.<p>Combine that with binary file formats, the need for backwards compatibility, the need for newer software to read older file formats and in the case of Flash, the need for newer plugins to execute old, buggy bytecode because so many compiled swf files are out there of which the source (also in binary .fla form btw.) is long lost.<p>It's so easy to look at Flash player today and laugh at Adobe, but remember: this piece of Software comes from a different age where nobody but the Unix guys knew better (and <i>they</i> knew better than to touch Windows).<p>It's a good thing that it's slowly dying I guess.<p>By the way: I'm as guilty as anybody else.<p>Thankfully though, the age of dial-up is over so nobody is going to use that Windows dialer I wrote back in those days (despite its bugs, it was deemed good enough to win awards even in dead-tree publications).<p>Where this does bite me personally though is in the Windows frontend of our product. I've written that abomination right after finishing high-school back in 2001.<p>Unfortunately it is still in wide use and I have to maintain it which is ever so painful.<p>In theory it really needs a rewrite, but by this time all new users are - of course - using the web frontend, so only people who don't care at all about technology are still using the windows clients (still 25% Windows 98 of all things)<p>So rewriting the client and then pushing an auto update would be incredibly painful for them unless it's pixel-by-pixel identical.<p>And to make this rewrite run on Windows 98. I don't even want to think about this.
For some perspective, the Flash Player code base is almost 20 years old and must maintain binary compatibility with ancient content (because many websites have binary .swf files without the .fla source files). Flash is likely the world's most installed software when you consider that most Windows <i>and</i> Mac <i>and</i> Android devices have Flash.
I have lost faith in Adobe because they cannot get their products working on case sensitive HFS volumes. The problem has existed for almost a decade I think. The fact that one cannot install Creative Suite on another volume makes it even worse.
Why am I not surprised this is about bugs in Flash?<p>It ain't much better on the artist side. The UI revision after the Adobe/Macromedia suit was so bad it was one of the major reasons I left the animation industry. My friends who stayed have AMAZING piles of helper scripts to patch it up and make it halfway usable.
I still like ActionScript because I like javascript, but in many cases I want to declare my types so I can get type checks at compile time instead of being surprised or having to write unit tests to be sure of myself. Also refactoring large javascript or python projects is my nightmare because getting it to 'compile' means nothing, so many bugs could be lurking still.
He's critical of the compiler's optimization and the efficiency of the code, but doesn't Flash have an embedded JIT, which effectively means the byte codes are pre-compilation, and actions that might seem like optimizations would potentially make the JIT's life far more difficult?
Now I know the reason why I felt uncomfortable about ActionScript. Flash folks were always convincing me that AS3 is perfectly fine and kickass language. Next time I'll just link this.
Also, there are some great and funny comments about this article on reddit: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/t9qxy/reaching_the_limits_of_adobe_stupidity/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/t9qxy/reaching_...</a>