my programming life (was: Re: Rotating images)

[Colin Holgate]

On Apr 25, 2009, at 3:47 PM, Randall Reetz wrote:

> Just as i suspected.  Life long nerds should never be alowed to  
> publically use the word "easy".

Well, that slightly misquotes me. What I said was:

"If you mean ActionScript, it's not hard once you get over your fears  
of it."

I was stubbornly just doing HyperCard at the time I had to learn  
Director, and stubbornly just doing Director when I had to learn  
Flash. There are a lot of Flash users who hate Director, with no good  
reason, and a lot of Director users who hate how different the Flash  
environment is to Director. Hopefully I never did hate Flash, but I  
was resistant to learning it, just because everyone else was using it  
wasn't a convincing argument to me at the time.

What makes something difficult is just familiarity. To move an object  
horizontally by its own width amount is this in Rev:

    set the left of me to the left of me + the width of me

this in Director:

   spritenum = the spritenum of me
   sprite(spritenum).loch = sprite(spritenum).loch +  
sprite(spritenum).width

and in this in Flash:

   x += width;

The Flash one may only seem to be harder because you're not adjusted  
to the way the language works. Once you're over that, it's no harder  
than the other two ways of working.