I only got into CS because of flash. It was simple to get started. Draw some shapes, add color and start tweening. Point and click got you very interesting animations. Deploying was a swf that worked in a ubiquitous manner. Then I learnt a bit of Actionscript on my own before even learning any sort of formal programming. It was a ton of fun to add event listeners and do basic interaction. I learnt what object oriented programming was. The sprites were the objects and I could program them and create dynamic instances.
I would spend entire holidays messing around in flash obsessively. Also then got into mxml and Flex.
Yeah I then learnt C, Java, JavaScript, Python etc but it wasn’t really as fun as Flash. Flash had progressive unwrapping of complexity. You could create impressive games in Flash quite easily. I learnt a ton by decompiling existing games from miniclip.com (love that site) and changing things to see what effect they had. Kirupa.com was a fantastic resource too.
Oh man. I could talk for hours about Flash and the self learning experiences.
I got an A in 7th grade biology because I animated the electron transport chain in a little flash movie over a holiday break. I burned the swf onto a CD and gave it to my biology teacher who then showed it on his computer during parent teacher night.
I would spend entire holidays messing around in flash obsessively. Also then got into mxml and Flex.
Yeah I then learnt C, Java, JavaScript, Python etc but it wasn’t really as fun as Flash. Flash had progressive unwrapping of complexity. You could create impressive games in Flash quite easily. I learnt a ton by decompiling existing games from miniclip.com (love that site) and changing things to see what effect they had. Kirupa.com was a fantastic resource too.
Oh man. I could talk for hours about Flash and the self learning experiences.