I'll say one positive thing about flash: the idea of semi-visual programming on the web being gone is a loss. Not only is it a much more accessible way to develop things for a much wider audience, it's also a relatively productive way to develop.<p>Before that, Java applets failed and after that, Silverlight failed. 25 years ago I was visually programming desktop apps in Delphi. Drag and drop, advanced layout mechanisms, rich library of standardized UI controls, advanced data binding, you name it.<p>It's quite ridiculous how we anti-progressed since then. Now we're back to text files and terminals. Weird frameworks to fill the gaps of the web but none really have batteries included. There's no language library in JS, nor is there a UI library. You all have to glue it together and hope it works. Not even the development flow is standardized, it's multiple tools stitched together each of which having 7,000 dependencies. Knowledge is also not portable, nobody is able to maintain that 7 year old Angular project and newbies have no idea where to start.<p>It adds up to the #1 issue in our industry: low productivity. We've positioned ourselves into a garbage development ecosystem that is very hard to understand whilst outputting little, both in quantity and quality.<p>This issue is much bigger than poor tools. These poor tools means billions are wasted on an ongoing basis reinventing the exact same thing over and over. It means knowledge is not sticky, so there's a huge cost in re-learning things. It means a lot of creative people are locked out of development, as it's too intimidating to them.<p>"See, this tree-shaken bundle gets loaded and then rehydrates the server response, after which state is in the store and you just work on your component but be mindful of its side effects and dependencies as your re-render has to be a pure function, kind of like the reducers in your store, which are similar to actions but not really. Told you it was easy."