Do people still think AS3 is bad and AS2 is good?

Like many others, I was frustrated when AS3 came out. I thought that AS3 pointlessly did away with a lot of simple functionality, like adding commands to a button or loading .swfs into an external clip. I almost walked away from the application.

Then I got my head around the display list by reading online resources and a few books. Then three Flash projects dropped in my lap. The end result? For the first project, I utilized the AS3 display list a little but used more old skool AS2 tricks. For the second one, I used a more AS3 concepts than AS2 ones. For the third one, I went all AS3 and created a fairly complicated Flash movie in five days. It was made up of seven .swfs, each one of them containing one frame and one frame only. No timeline tweens, just class-based animation. Now, I'm thinking about what my next project will be and am planning for it to rely on XML. And, FYI, if you learn the display list, then XML is easier than it was in AS2.

There are still things that I need to get my head around, like packages and public & private functions (FYI, can anyone point me to a good step-by-step tutorial on this?). But I believe that if one learns some key concepts like the display list and the Tween class, then AS3 is, in many ways, easier than AS2.

I've seen a lot of past threads complaining about AS3 so I'm just wondering what the status quo is now.

To be honest, I hated AS3 when it first debut because it meant that I couldn't attach code to buttons.

A few years later... I was just being lazy then. AS3 is seen now as an robust option with a higher learning curve than AS2.

Just my two cents.

Yes, some people still think as3 is bad and as2 is good.

Then again, many people believe some really stupid and downright wrong things.

I'll take it a step further and say I'm quite sure there are still those who hate AS2 and love AS1. There will always be a percentage that fall behind as versions advance I suppose.

If you are a hobbiest thinking like that is really a matter of personal preference and has no impact on the one making the choice. They code for fun and only have themselves to please. If however you use Actionscript in any way to earn your living I've always regarded it as pure stupidity to NOT migrate to each new version to stay current and compete.

I think Gerbs and I have talked about this before and I will from time to time pull out code of mine that is archived from years past based on AS1 and AS2 and it's funny how at the time I spent coutless hours building these things and using that code and now it literally tries my patience to even lay eyes on it. It's so.....yesterday. I imagine, should I live a long life, that someday I will be pulling out old AS3 code and feeling the same.

So there is a consensus that AS3 is strictly better? I do find that it is much harder, but knowing AS2, it should be a matter of conversion.

The professional world of Computer Graphics, Photography, Photoshop, 3DStudio Max, Flash, Illustration, and so forth is different than most fields. I've never heard anyway say "Oh I'm a biomedical physicist" and someone reply, "Oh yeah, me and my cousin do smoe biomedical physics too, we freelance and stuff, we can do all that too."

But with this field, it's different. Everyone thinks they can do it. And it waters down the field, making it harder to make money for people actually trained. In that regard, I HOPE AS 3.0 is harder than previous versions. I want it to be harder to learn.

It's definetly harder to learn. In AS2, simple actions like button commands and loading .swfs into external movie clips could easily be picked up. Now, AS3 is a full-on OOP and requires understanding things like global variables, packages and functions. I must say that knowing functions is a big chunk of the battle in learning AS3. Understanding the display list concept is the biggest chunk.