You are probably right in some respects about why Flash projects are messy and bad. Most Flash programmers live in the past when you couldn’t do very much programming in Flash, and haven’t kept up, or couldn’t keep up.

But I don’t agree that too little time is an important cause. A good programmer, or a programmer who knows how to program properly, will not write the best code when under pressure, but I have no doubts that it will be more or less obvious when reading the code that he or she knew what he or she was doing. A good programmer knows what actually saves time and what is just short-sightedness that will come back and bite you — for example code duplication.

When going through other Flash programmers code I don’t think that they really know what they’re doing. They know that one thing does this and another does that, but there is no fundamental understanding. Pressure of course makes this even worse, but I don’t think it changes much.

You are right in telling me off for generalising about Flash programmers, I know I shouldn’t do it, but really, working as a freelancer I have met two that were good, and so many that have no clue. It makes it hard not to. I have no doubt that there are many good Flash programmers out there, and I would guess that those that came to the platform quite late (as I did) learned to use it in a good way, or knew how to program properly beforehand.

And I agree that I would be a bad programmer for a “short hackish Flash project”. I have done short Flash projects, but I have never and will never do a hackish project. I just don’t think there is anything to gain from using that approach. It will always come back to you, as soon as there is a requirement change (and there always is) you are screwed because changes take double the time they otherwise would.

be careful with that :)

reading your post, if you give up after 1h just because you saw such construct as _parent._parent._parent I would say you maybe a good programmer for long structured project but a bad programmer for dailly hackish flash project

I don’t what was this particular project, but think about those few things:

• people coded in flash way before classes (AS2) were there
• flash does not have only one main entry point (even with Flash9 AS3)
• if you are time restrained, you don’t really program flash, you hack flash

I don’t defend sloppy or bad programmer, but still when you see that kind of bad programming you always have to think about how much time the guy had to make something work

_global, _parent, _lockroot, prototype.addAnythingIwant, etc. are acceptable hacks to make things work fast