I'm too deep in the coder lifestyle these days to say what it is like on the other side, but as an former serious music student, I can offer an analogue.
Anybody who has learned music and studied it seriously can tell you it colors the way you hear all music. When I was deep in it, pop music was intolerable. I liked rock, don't get me wrong, but it was all art/hipster stuff. Before you're "enlightened" with musical performance and theory, music just kind of "washes" over you. You get a beat and a mood but you're not taking it apart. After such "enlightenment," you'll hear it all in terms of time signatures, keys & changes, scales & modes, references, cliches & conventions, etc. Much like being a coder, it is a beautiful, cursed understanding. I'm now fully a decade into "recovery" from thinking I was a musician, and I will tell you I really like not having to think so damn much about my music.
So, if that is at all similar (and I think it is; btw, lawyers are another class of geek that have similar problems to programmers and musicians)...yes, it can get better! :)
Hey, you know, you do make some good points, and that was a good article. You're really astoundingly condescending and irritable, but I'm sure you're a smart person.
At the end of the day, I'll say "my bad" for conflating Flash and ActionScript. They're not the same thing at all. I am a frequent user of Javascript both in the browser and servers, so I look fondly on most ECMAScript variants. The language is distinct from its runtime environment, which is where I find my gripes. I'll also admit that my past use of Flash is both dated and was closer to a "script kiddie" experience than what I do now, and while I doubt I was the worst developer ever, I was probably making bad decisions by both of our standards today.
But therein lies, to me, the real problem with Flash. For the sake of constructive discussion, I will just concede all your points about the stability of the plugin -- since you did make good points about Apple's accusation, let's just grant the plugin is refined, secure, and stable. I think we can agree the easy publishing of the web enables bad developers all the time. They just write their shitty code, run it through bad or no QA, FTP it somewhere and boom, users are downloading and running it. This is bad enough with the HTML/CSS/JS stack. Flash exacerbates the problem by expanding the API handles available for shitty devs to put their shitty hands on. From the "user" point of view, where user is not either of us but someone who only wants technology to work for them, Flash comes with a lot more bad treatment than most things on the web. Dancing hamsters merely offend; bad Javascript can break a page load; but it takes a powerful plugin like Flash to really make your computer grind gears.
And that gets to the crux of my argument -- CSS animations. When you start adding powerful features like that to a web technology, you know it will be abused because the web is full of shitty developers. Style sheets using these features are already crashing people's browsers (and I looked at the source for those animations -- I don't think these guys are even hacks at all). That shouldn't be happening. The world needs a stable stack of web technologies that minimize the damage bad developers can do. And this is just talking about poor code; you know the danger that a sweeping API poses in the hand of a black hat...big nod to ActiveX there. I know, the assertion that we should limit technology to account for the lowest common denominator sounds ridiculous, but do you really know of any way to stop bad developers from getting their code to run on user's devices? They seem to persist no matter what!
Eh, I could go on. But no one is going to see this stuff at this point. I guess we'll see what the future holds, but I think bottom line...Flash had a good 10+ year run. It was a net benefit to the web. But there are things about it we ought not repeat, especially in other mature, dependable technologies, like CSS.
I'm not sure if you want clarification, or you're a Flash fan and want to imply an ad hominem. I try to follow the principle of charity on the internet so here's clarification.
Flash seems like a crash-prone plugin. I recall Apple had data to back that up when they pulled support for it on iOS. Since I want assurance that my web code will run reliably in as many places it is deployed as possible, I don't look fondly on Flash/ActionScript (the old IDE wasn't my favorite either, no idea how much that has improved over the years). I actually love the idea of a write-once-run-anywhere rich media platform, but in practice Flash had too many downsides, at least for my work.
I'm not sure animations are a priority I'd set for CSS. I think it has bigger fish to fry. People want to push CSS toward being more of a script language than a markup language, hence the new Webkit variables. I seem to hold an unpopular view but I think these things will complicate and possibly make CSS less attractive to use. I'd rather see CSS be improved syntatically, incorporating features natively like those SASS gives you. (EDIT: to clarify the apparent contradiction, SASS has "variables" but they are really immutable constants, very different from what the CSS var RQs specify)
I haven't been this impressed with CSS since csszengarden.com.
However, I have my doubts about animations. Keeps giving me flashbacks to ActionScript...and I already see comments indicating the site made their browser crash.
There was a This American Life/Radiolab story about a guy who rolled his own Helminthic Therapy. If it weren't for the fact that the therapy was illegal (which is a whole other issue) and therefore very difficult for him to get, it would hardly have been a "story." Just an amazing cure for allergies/autoimmune problems. But the story was really in how he had to wander all over Africa shuffling through latrines to get a few hookworms. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/404/e... . It's act 3.
Anybody who has learned music and studied it seriously can tell you it colors the way you hear all music. When I was deep in it, pop music was intolerable. I liked rock, don't get me wrong, but it was all art/hipster stuff. Before you're "enlightened" with musical performance and theory, music just kind of "washes" over you. You get a beat and a mood but you're not taking it apart. After such "enlightenment," you'll hear it all in terms of time signatures, keys & changes, scales & modes, references, cliches & conventions, etc. Much like being a coder, it is a beautiful, cursed understanding. I'm now fully a decade into "recovery" from thinking I was a musician, and I will tell you I really like not having to think so damn much about my music.
So, if that is at all similar (and I think it is; btw, lawyers are another class of geek that have similar problems to programmers and musicians)...yes, it can get better! :)