[zeroq]

It is absolutely infuriating that Flash, ActionScript and ES4 draft were completely erased from history.

I was there since '00.

It all started with Macromedia and their animation tool. They had an idea to add simple scripting so you add commands like "stop" or "gotoAndPlay(n)" on your animation timeline. For whatever reason they chose to use EcmaScript (aka JS).

Soon after it turned out that people were doing actual programming and shortly after in 2003 they came up with updated version called ActionScript 2.0 that added all OOP features from Java. This became the EcmaScript 4 draft.

If you ever wondered why JS has reserved keywords like "abstract", "protected" or "interface" this is why.

What's funny is that by that time the underlying engine was still working on the old ES3 so when you compiled your app your code was transpiled in exact same way TS is transpiled into JS today.

We had MXML, which was XML for laying out your controllers and classes like we do today with React and web components.

We had Alchemy that allowed you to compile C directly into Flash bytecode - exactly what emscripten is doing. And there was even a way to write assembler directly if you were brave enough.

Around 2008 there was even a thing called RedTamarin which was... command line runtime for ActionScript, just like NodeJS.

And then Apple came, Flash was gone, and with it all these things.

All of these things were erased from memory, and for the next 10 years community was slowly reinventing the wheel.