Joeflash’s Enigmacopaedia

There’s a great article on the O’Reilly DigitalMedia Blog about whether it is harder to learn AS2 or AS3, by Colin Moock.

As I commented on the Flash In TO forums, great article. Should go a long way to dispelling a lot of myths and apprehensions that beginners have about delving into AS3. Every college multimedia teacher and Flash instructor should give this to their students.

Although I do have to disagree with Moock on one fundamental point: you do need to teach basic OOP principles to beginners for them to get AS3. In AS2, you could get away with not learning about classes and objects until you used some of the Flash 7 API stuff like MovieClipLoader, and it was essential to do anything with Flash 8 API classes such as BitmapData or Tween.

But teaching OOP to beginners is not the daunting task most instructors or writers think it is. In fact, if you teach the basics of OOP — what is an object, what is a class, class inheritance — without getting into building custom classes, you’re doing beginners a huge favour, and will vastly increase their comprehension of the material. I usually find a Taxonomy/DNA metaphor works best when explaining OOP concepts.

I’ve taught an AS3 course the old way, without OOP until the end, and with a discussion of OOP right at the start, and I’ve found that students absorb the material much easier when exposed to the concept of objects and classes and inheritance right from the start. If you don’t teach them OOP at the very start, you’ll find there’s a barrier of comprehension when they try and increase their knowledege to an intermediate level (i.e. coding with advanced API functionality, but still on the timeline). And you can talk about OOP and still teach timeline-based coding.

The one argument I’ve heard arguing for AS2 being easier than AS3 are events, or more particularly the new event model. As an advanced ActionScripter, it’s heaven. But I have to agree, for the novice ActionScripter, events in AS3 do seem more complicated. Although, like I mentioned, I found that once students had a firm understanding of objects, classes and functions, the leap was not that large. What is crucial in the understanding of the Flash designer is whether they get function scope. Once they understand function scope, the benefits of the AS3 event listeners over AS2 event handlers is evident. The disadvantage of AS event handlers does not become obvious until the student moves into intermediate projects, and they wonder why their project isn’t working, because AS2 doesn’t use closed methods. It’s far harder to explain mx.utils.Delegate than to show them the AS3 event model IMO. So to the novice who is used to learning AS exclusively by doing, yes learning AS 3 may seem harder on the basis of the AS3 event model. But once they actually understand the fundamentals, the benefits of AS3 become obvious and this perceived barrier to learning is not so daunting.

Slightly OT, there are a few things that piss me off about AS3 I wish they’d continued from AS2, such as private constructors (though I understand the reasoning behind this move), and the lack of equivalent for the AS2 onReleaseOutside event. But the advances in so many other areas in AS3 far far outweigh these annoyances.

As Colin mentions, another great resource to convince would-be AS3-ers is Grant’s 50 Reasons ActionScript 3.0 Kicks Ass. :)

On the whole an excellent article.