WTF Bites

[loopback0]

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra The ones that still idle 20-30 minutes after the meeting has ended are the real heroes. Clearly much attention was paid to the meeting.

If it's Webex then I hang up the phone and assume the meeting gets ended when the host leaves. If the host leaves without killing the meeting then I'll remain connected to the Webex app until I realise, which often was when trying to join another meeting which got blocked because our Webex only let you join one meeting at a time.
If it's Teams then most of the time I just join via the app on my phone, so my default is to just leave on my phone and that's it. On the times I've joined from my PC as well as my phone, I used to forget to leave on the PC too.
In either case I'm aware the meeting has ended, I've just forgotten to make sure I quit fully.

[dcon]

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra The ones that still idle 20-30 minutes after the meeting has ended are the real heroes. Clearly much attention was paid to the meeting.

Most of the ones I'm in auto-close when the organizer leaves.

[PleegWat]

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra The ones that still idle 20-30 minutes after the meeting has ended are the real heroes. Clearly much attention was paid to the meeting.

Most of the ones I'm in auto-close when the organizer leaves.

Zoom forces the owner to either close the meeting or assign a new owner when they leave, so they tend to get closed.

[hungrier]

MS Paint's Skew

You can enter an angle to skew something horizontally or vertically. It works just fine when you want a positive angle, but when you try to type a minus sign, this happens:

That's dumb, maybe for you have to keep it positive. Ok, I'll try this:

The solution is to type a minus sign somewhere else, then copy paste it into the window.

[dkf]

@hungrier How to not do entry validation: the post. is MS have existing components for entry of numbers. They just didn't use them.

(I wonder whether it allows you to use fractional angles. Probably not, and you'd probably have to play fancy games to get it past the crappy on-key-press validator even if it worked…)

[hungrier]

@dkf said in WTF Bites:

(I wonder whether it allows you to use fractional angles. Probably not, and you'd probably have to play fancy games to get it past the crappy on-key-press validator even if it worked…)

Doesn't seem to. Pasting a negative number works, but pasting anything with a decimal point throws up the "unacceptable character" error

[Zerosquare]

I'm wondering why you need to use the Skew function in MS Paint in the first place.

[dcon]

@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:

I'm wondering why you need to use the Skew function in MS Paint in the first place.

[boomzilla]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden Also, dart language. Does anybody know what is the reason for that language to exist? What is supposed to make it better than languages they already had?

As mentioned, it was from Google. Some googler's 20% project. The goal, a worthy one, was to get rid of javascript.

[Zerosquare]

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:

I'm wondering why you need to use the Skew function in MS Paint in the first place.

MS Paint is installed by default and starts up quickly. For basic stuff, it's fine. But if you need something like Skew, you're usually better off with a more advanced program, with features such as preview, setting the parameters interactively and a better interpolation algorithm.

[dcon]

@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:

MS Paint is installed by default

First thing I do on a new system is install Paint.net.

[Gąska]

@dcon what for?

[hungrier]

There are some things that Paint did right (skew and resize not being among them), that haven't been replicated in other software. E.g. canceling a stroke by pressing the other mouse button

[cvi]

@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:

But if you need something like Skew

But your original question remains ... wtf do you need a skew for?

[Gąska]

@hungrier said in WTF Bites:

E.g. canceling a stroke by pressing the other mouse button

A poor man's undo - it does the same thing except you can't redo. I cursed at this "feature" many more times than I found it useful.

[hungrier]

@Gąska I like it better than undo, not only because of MS Paint's messed up undo handling, but also because I don't have to do anything other than keep using the mouse.

[Gąska]

@hungrier said in WTF Bites:

not only because of MS Paint's messed up undo handling

It's got much better with Windows 7. Maybe you should upgrade.

@hungrier said in WTF Bites:

but also because I don't have to do anything other than keep using the mouse.

Edit -> Undo

My main problem with right-click-to-cancel is that it's too convenient. Which makes me click it accidentally all the fucking time. And there's no redo.

[HardwareGeek]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

My main problem with right-click-to-cancel is that it's too convenient. Which makes me click it accidentally all the fucking time.

I have exactly the same problem in Blender, especially with my trackball (before it decided to stop clicking at all).

[hungrier]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

It's got much better with Windows 7. Maybe you should upgrade.

It's still messed up. Sometimes it works, other times it'll undo too far (and redo will mess it up worse)

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Edit -> Undo

Going to the menu bar with the mouse? :isthistrolling:

[Bulb]

@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden Also, dart language. Does anybody know what is the reason for that language to exist? What is supposed to make it better than languages they already had?

As mentioned, it was from Google. Some googler's 20% project.

The goal, a worthy one, was to get rid of javascript.

The author clearly failed to understand XKCD#927.

1. It's not possible to get rid of JavaScript. There is already production code written in it.
2. If you want to write for web in something else, you need to compile something to javascript/asm.js/wasm. But there is plenty of existing languages for which such compilation could be implemented, without inventing a new one. It was already being done for Java. In Google too, no less (Google Web Toolkit).

Ergo, Dart is .

[Zerosquare]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

It's not possible to get rid of JavaScript. There is already production code written in it.

You can't get rid of it, but you could deprecate it.

Imagine if major browser vendors agreed on something like this: "from now on, we'll be making client-side Web development language-neutral by switching to WASM. Existing Javascript code will keep working as is, but new features won't be supported. If you want to keep using Javascript, we recommend precompiling it to WASM."

The reinvent-the-wheel-every-Monday syndrome of Web developers would actually be helpful for once. You'd see new frameworks written in something other than JS. In a few years, they'd replace what we're using now.

(Am I dreaming? Yeah, I'm dreaming.)

[Gąska]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

1. It's not possible to get rid of JavaScript. There is already production code written in it.

It was soon after Flash died. Everyone was hopeful real change is possible. They just forgot that Flash->JS change was for the worse.

[Arantor]

@Zerosquare unfortunately the mere existence of Babel disproves the theory, most hipster front end devs have been ahead of the curve of “commonly supported browsers” and rely on transpilation builds to make it so they can write good/modern/pure/whatever ES20whateverthefuckyear and browsers get a minified blob using 3 versions back.

[LaoC]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

1. It's not possible to get rid of JavaScript. There is already production code written in it.

It was soon after Flash died. Everyone was hopeful real change is possible. They just forgot that Flash->JS change was for the worse.

It would have been an improvement even if Flash had been replaced with MUMPS. Or come to think of it, with the week-old carcass of a whale that died of anthrax.

[Gąska]

@LaoC you've never done any Flash programming, have you.

[Bulb]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

1. It's not possible to get rid of JavaScript. There is already production code written in it.

It was soon after Flash died. Everyone was hopeful real change is possible. They just forgot that Flash->JS change was for the worse.

The Flash->JS change was definitely for the better, because now the page can actually work as one cohesive whole, which it never could with flash. Well, unless you wrote it completely in flash, but that meant reimplementing a lot of the things that HTML is actually fairly good at. And the language is almost the same anyway.

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

@Zerosquare unfortunately the mere existence of Babel disproves the theory, most hipster front end devs have been ahead of the curve of “commonly supported browsers” and rely on transpilation builds to make it so they can write good/modern/pure/whatever ES20whateverthefuckyear and browsers get a minified blob using 3 versions back.

Yet they don't want to depart from ES altogether and switch to a more powerful language. In part because they already know ES—and there will always be benefit to knowing ES at least for sake of being able to do quick tests directly in the browser—and in part because it's not that bad language. At least not until you are doing something really complex, which most front-ends are not.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@LaoC you've never done any Flash programming, have you.

I did. It was massive pain in the arse (partly because of the tooling) and then we had to rewrite half of it, because we started with Flash 9, but then it turned out the target platform could only support Flash 8 (it had to display on some embedded thingamajig). I am really glad flash died in a fire.

[Gąska]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

And the language is almost the same anyway.

Damn, now I have flashbacks to one particular argument with Blakey.

Imagine a language with classes, inheritance, private/public/protected access modifiers, interfaces, statically typed methods and fields. Does that sound like anything that could be called "almost the same as JS"? Because this is what ActionScript 3 was.

Granted, I was a late adopter so I don't know what AS2 was like. I heard it was far worse. As for webpage integration - yes, you have a point, although that's a problem of DOM not being exposed to browser plugins rather than anything inherent to Flash. If DOM was only available through C++, everyone would make websites in C++ and not JS.

Also, I'm now honor bound to mock you mercilessly for calling JS "not that bad language". Off the top of my head, I can give you about 200 reasons why it's completely abhorrent in every detail, without even talking about undefined.

[Arantor]

@Gąska something something TypeScript transpired down.

[Bulb]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Imagine a language with classes, inheritance, private/public/protected access modifiers, interfaces, statically typed methods and fields. Does that sound like anything that could be called "almost the same as JS"?

It was all pretty much syntactic sugar on top of the same prototype-based core. So yes, it was quite close to what ES6 is now.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Granted, I was a late adopter so I don't know what AS2 was like.

AS2 was old JavaScript with some spurious differences just for sake of not being exactly compatible. And because code written in AS2 still had to work in the AS3 versions…

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

As for webpage integration - yes, you have a point, although that's a problem of DOM not being exposed to browser plugins rather than anything inherent to Flash.

It wasn't exposed because of the complexity and combinatorial explosion of combinations. Browser plugins were not a good approach.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Off the top of my head, I can give you about 200 reasons why it's completely abhorrent in every detail, without even talking about undefined.

It is (or was before ES6) a nice simple language with tiny core, which makes it really good for embedding. Granted, they eff'd up the implicit conversions of anything to anything instead of just raising errors for the nonsensical combinations, and adding null was a bad decision, but they share that with Java, and C++ made way more bad decisions, and some are much worse.

Every language has its warts, because language design is very much a trade-off. And JS is a fairly good trade-off for the quick hacks it was designed for. As all duck-typed languages it lacks manipulexity, which is what transpilers are for. But because the transpiled language must interoperate with the target, it is better to keep it a more straightforward extension, like TypeScript is, than build a complex monster with a kitchen sink like Dart.

And yes, I would have preferred if browsers did not implement ES6, but left it up the the transpilers everybody was using already. It would have kept the browser simpler, left their authors more time to hunt for security vulnerabilities, and wouldn't matter much as everybody was already using transpilers for anything non-trivial anyway.

[Gąska]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Imagine a language with classes, inheritance, private/public/protected access modifiers, interfaces, statically typed methods and fields. Does that sound like anything that could be called "almost the same as JS"?

It was all pretty much syntactic sugar on top of the same prototype-based core. So yes, it was quite close to what ES6 is now.

The flashbacks!

C++ is also 99% syntactic sugar over C, and also was originally transpiled down. But if you even think about saying C and C++ are essentially the same, I'll have to revoke your programming license.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

As for webpage integration - yes, you have a point, although that's a problem of DOM not being exposed to browser plugins rather than anything inherent to Flash.

It wasn't exposed because of the complexity and combinatorial explosion of combinations.

For comparison, HTML5 took 5 years just to figure out what should be in it. Imagine if all the man-centuries of work and the billions of dollars put in development of HTML5 ecosystem was instead spent on making Flash more tightly integrated with browsers.

Of course that would never happen because of inter-corporate politics between Adobe, Google and Apple. But that's beside the point - we're talking technology, not politics.

Browser plugins were not a good approach.

Sure. But imagine if Flash was promoted to The One True Way, like JS is now. That would be no larger undertaking than what ended up happening in real world.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Off the top of my head, I can give you about 200 reasons why it's completely abhorrent in every detail, without even talking about undefined.

It is (or was before ES6) a nice simple language with tiny core, which makes it really good for embedding.

Which is exactly why it was useless for anything larger than FizzBuzz. Of course you may argue websites shouldn't be more complex than FizzBuzz to start with. And I would agree with you. But that would change your argument from "JS is superior to Flash" to "I just want the modern web to die".

and C++ made way more bad decisions

JS has at least an order of magnitude lead on that front. Starting with the absolutely retarded way this works, and ending with the six different ways to iterate a collection, each with a slightly different behavior.

And JS is a fairly good trade-off for the quick hacks it was designed for.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0SF-oQmqaj0

Every single design decision in JS - EVERY SINGLE ONE - ended up being a total disaster, as evident by the successive JS revisions being mostly focused on undoing the earlier design decisions. Classes to replace prototype inheritance, arrow functions to sanitize this, the aforementioned six ways to iterate, an actual Map library type to make people stop using objects as associative containers that they were originally meant to be - just to name a few.

As all duck-typed languages it lacks manipulexity

Python has duck typing and it's a vastly superior language in every way, and always has been.

[topspin]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@LaoC you've never done any Flash programming, have you.

The problem with flash wasn't the developer side. Or maybe it was too, but it's irrelevant.
The problem with flash was on the consumer side. It's opaque, it's proprietary third-party code with no alternative, it's buggy and insecure. It doesn't integrate well with the browser. The only good thing is that you could block it, or use "click to activate".

[Gąska]

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@LaoC you've never done any Flash programming, have you.

The problem with flash wasn't the developer side.

Pretty much my point. It was a superior technology that was killed for reasons completely unrelated to technology. Although it's only superior because JS is such a low bar.

The greater point was - while change is possible, change for the better isn't - which is why all the "replace JS with something better" projects are doomed to fail. But I have no doubt that sooner or later, JS will be replaced by something even worse.

[dkf]

@hungrier said in WTF Bites:

There are some things that Paint did right (skew and resize not being among them), that haven't been replicated in other software. E.g. canceling a stroke by pressing the other mouse button

I've seen that in xfig as well. Which is now a very venerable piece of software, with many , but still great for drawing figures. (For a long time it wasn't usable on desktop machines at all, since it assumes you've got a three button mouse. Which almost everyone has now.)

[Bulb]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Imagine a language with classes, inheritance, private/public/protected access modifiers, interfaces, statically typed methods and fields. Does that sound like anything that could be called "almost the same as JS"?

It was all pretty much syntactic sugar on top of the same prototype-based core. So yes, it was quite close to what ES6 is now.

The flashbacks!

C++ is also 99% syntactic sugar over C, and also was originally transpiled down. But if you even think about saying C and C++ are essentially the same, I'll have to revoke your programming license.

The transpilation isn't an argument; at the end everything is compiled into the machine instructions anyway.
But C++ has a lot of logic in the in the layer it added on top of C. AS3 didn't have all that much, really.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

As for webpage integration - yes, you have a point, although that's a problem of DOM not being exposed to browser plugins rather than anything inherent to Flash.

It wasn't exposed because of the complexity and combinatorial explosion of combinations.

For comparison, HTML5 took 5 years just to figure out what should be in it. Imagine if all the man-centuries of work and the billions of dollars put in development of HTML5 ecosystem was instead spent on making Flash more tightly integrated with browsers.

Integrating Flash more tightly with browsers would take all the effort HTML5 took, plus more. Because it would either have to be done in a manner compatible between the browsers—requiring the same agreement between them—or have to be done for each browser separately—taking much more work in the end.

Of course that would never happen because of inter-corporate politics between Adobe, Google and Apple. But that's beside the point - we're talking technology, not politics.

We have to. No matter how good a technical solution could be, if it can't be agreed upon, it's worthless.

Browser plugins were not a good approach.

Sure. But imagine if Flash was promoted to The One True Way, like JS is now. That would be no larger undertaking than what ended up happening in real world.

The tooling for flash was absolutely abhorrent. The fact HTML does not require any specific tooling—even if it is useful to have some for the more complex projects—is an important feature.

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

Off the top of my head, I can give you about 200 reasons why it's completely abhorrent in every detail, without even talking about undefined.

It is (or was before ES6) a nice simple language with tiny core, which makes it really good for embedding.

Which is exactly why it was useless for anything larger than FizzBuzz. Of course you may argue websites shouldn't be more complex than FizzBuzz to start with. And I would agree with you. But that would change your argument from "JS is superior to Flash" to "I just want the modern web to die".

JS isn't superior to AS, but AS wasn't that much better to make the overall horrible solution better. The language itself is a tiny detail of the overall stack.

and C++ made way more bad decisions

JS has at least an order of magnitude lead on that front. Starting with the absolutely retarded way this works, and ending with the six different ways to iterate a collection, each with a slightly different behavior.

And JS is a fairly good trade-off for the quick hacks it was designed for.

Every single design decision in JS - EVERY SINGLE ONE - ended up being a total disaster, as evident by the successive JS revisions being mostly focused on undoing the earlier design decisions. Classes to replace prototype inheritance, arrow functions to sanitize this, the aforementioned six ways to iterate, an actual Map library type to make people stop using objects as associative containers that they were originally meant to be - just to name a few.

As all duck-typed languages it lacks manipulexity

Python has duck typing and it's a vastly superior language in every way, and always has been.

JavaScript suffers from too many chefs. The way this works is indeed retarded, but there would never be six ways to iterate a collection if the language had a design group.

Python has the advantage of having a BDFL. And it didn't make the mistake of trying to proceed in face of errors by making everything convertible to anything else. But it also needs a much bigger runtime and is quite a bit slower.

I do like python and use it a lot, and wouldn't use javascript for the same kind of work, but mainly because that kind of work often involves accessing the filesystem and I don't want to deal with the async brain-damage for that. But JavaScript is good enough for where it is used. Good enough and implemented trumps perfect in development every time.

[Kamil Podlesak]

@DogsB said in WTF Bites:

@loopback0 In no way related but your post reminded me of a friend of mine who talks about how great IntelliJ is non stop. He had never used Netbeans and used eclipse for five minutes. So his experience of ides isn't that broad. (I used vim once to hack some js together on a production server and that was how I liked it!) He loves IntelliJ though. Bought a personal ultimate license he doesn't use.

He has to restart it at least once a day or else it will go funny. His words. Not mine. Also has to invalidate caches a few times a week because IntelliJ has shat the bed for some reason. On a beefy PC this is about ten to fifteen minutes of your life you won't get back. On the piece of shit laptops, we were given it was half an hour. It would have been more cost-effective to force him to use vim.

I know that this is not a "help" top, but still... he should downgrade to previous major version. Or even one of the older ones (2019, 2018, 2017). 2021 is really buggy, I hope we are near the tooth point.

You know, JetBrains traditionally follow the "sawtooth wave" development cycle: they release a new version each year - with more features, more bugs, more bloated and slower. Then they spend one year fixing all this stuff and the next version is fixed, stable and snappy. And the cycle starts again...

Of course, this was just a past performance in the last 15 years. It's entirely possible that they have cut off the cycle and switched to the "dunk dive" approach that is so popular with all software companies nowadays. But I would not mind - I can always go back to 2015/2016 version and it would still and order of magnitude better than the latest Eclipse.

[topspin]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

It was a superior technology that was killed for reasons completely unrelated to technology.

I wouldn't call these reasons unrelated to technology though. Superior developer tooling, maybe, but sub-par technology for the user.

[Bulb]

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

The problem with flash wasn't the developer side. Or maybe it was too, but it's irrelevant.

The developer side was also a problem.

It's opaque, it's proprietary third-party code with no alternative

Applied to the developer side as well. The code was in plain text files, but all the design was in a proprietary binary blob, which made it utter pain to work with it in a team. They somewhat fixed that later with flex, but it was already dying by then.

[dkf]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

quite a bit slower

Python's weird. It's core bytecode engine is pretty fast, but it has so many layers of complexity layered on top that things you might think would be fast — like adding two integers together — end up being surprisingly slow. Yes, you can use numpy for the cases where it really matters (bulk operations on very large numbers of values) but it doesn't change that Python's slow because of the way they've gone about being excessively flexible.

And its threading is truly terrible.

[Bulb]

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

I wouldn't call these reasons unrelated to technology though. Superior developer tooling, maybe, but sub-par technology for the user.

I am totally disputing that. The developer tooling (before flex, probably; I only worked with it on one project) was a train wreck that was ill-suited to larger projects.

[Gąska]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

As all duck-typed languages it lacks manipulexity

Python has duck typing and it's a vastly superior language in every way, and always has been.

JavaScript suffers from too many chefs. The way this works is indeed retarded, but there would never be six ways to iterate a collection if the language had a design group.

Each of those six ways was approved by the same design group. Maybe not the same people, but the same W3C task force.

[LaoC]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@LaoC you've never done any Flash programming, have you.

I learned enough ActionScript 2 to move and morph what I think they called tweens across the screen and do some other trivial stuff when my wife was going to do some interactive-picture-book kindof thing. Nothing really productive though.

The problem with Flash is what @topspin said (and no, "buggy, opaque, proprietary insecure shit" is not the same as "superior technology").
Flash was the single most used infection vector for Trojans et al for years, only rivalled by that other POS Adobe software called Acrobat Reader

[Bulb]

@dkf said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

quite a bit slower

Python's weird. It's core bytecode engine is pretty fast, but it has so many layers of complexity layered on top that things you might think would be fast — like adding two integers together — end up being surprisingly slow. Yes, you can use numpy for the cases where it really matters (bulk operations on very large numbers of values) but it doesn't change that Python's slow because of the way they've gone about being excessively flexible.

Python's flexibility unfortunately isn't simple, which makes it ill-suited for optimizations.

While JavaScript made a lot of bad choices, it is much simpler. It adds things by reusing something it already had instead of adding new concepts.

And its threading is truly terrible.

While JavaScript does not have any at all. And it's for the better, because with all the dynamic layers you simply can't safely manipulate stuff in parallel. Python did add cooperative multi-threading with async lateishly (3.5; 2015) too for cases where that's good enough.

I think Perl had the right idea by making threads almost independent processes sharing only explicitly specified variables, but it became mostly irrelevant before threading became relevant enough for it to be used more.

[BernieTheBernie]

@DogsB said in WTF Bites:

It would have been more cost-effective to force him to use vim.

But for re-starting vim, you must be able to exit it first...

[Bulb]

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

JavaScript suffers from too many chefs. The way this works is indeed retarded, but there would never be six ways to iterate a collection if the language had a design group.

Each of those six ways was approved by the same design group. Maybe not the same people, but the same W3C task force.

W3C was a typical standards committee with too many stake-holders and consequent politics in the way of “we'll approve this proposal of yours if you approve that other proposal of ours”. For HTML5 it is even more like that, but the number of stakeholders have reduced a bit with there being only three web engines that matter left.

[BernieTheBernie]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

must have had some reason to expend the effort to create the language

No. They started with some scripts and configuration files, and had some idea of parameterizing them. That grew along, became cancerous, and in the end, turned out to become their new language.
Actually, they are stuck now with the Inner Platform Effect TM, but by calling it a language, they manage to avoid the proper wording.

[Bulb]

@BernieTheBernie Well, that is a reason. It's not a good reason, but it's a reason. Which also makes it answer to my question.

[BernieTheBernie]

@Bulb That's an argument!

[Gąska]

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

It's opaque, it's proprietary third-party code with no alternative

Applied to the developer side as well. The code was in plain text files, but all the design was in a proprietary binary blob, which made it utter pain to work with it in a team. They somewhat fixed that later with flex, but it was already dying by then.

It was a result of corporate politics though, and fixing that later with Flex is the proof. As long as Adobe had virtual monopoly on interactive websites, they did everything they could to keep the entire ecosystem in their hands and cut off everyone else. They could've made Flex years earlier if they wanted, but they waited until they were already losing ground, at which point it was too late. You see a similar story with the PDF format - it was intentionally made needlessly complex and tooling-hostile in order to make it impossible to compete with Adobe.

The world could look very different today if Adobe didn't buy Macromedia. Imagine if Google took over Flash instead. Or even Microsoft.

[topspin]

@BernieTheBernie No it isn't!

[Bulb]

@Gąska The idea of having two disconnected stacks for web would still be a problem. It's better to have an unified stack.