Comment by neocritter
8 months ago
There's a parallel universe where someone convinced you to rewrite it in something else from the start and you spent years on the rewrite instead and it never went anywhere. Could you have done that emergency rewrite without 10 years of becoming an expert in the problem you were solving? The alternative universe has you spending time becoming an expert in a new language instead and maybe not getting anywhere with the rewrite.
Totally true. Spending years fine-tuning the business logic and UIs made the eventual rewrites a lot cleaner and faster, having already iterated many times over the years and discovering what worked and what didn't. And learning TS after AS3 was easy enough. The real pain point was switching from a paradigm in which I owned the screen graph down to the pixel-level placement of each component, to a trying to wrangle similar behavior from a mix of DOM elements, relative/absolute positioning and arbitrary stuff drawn into canvases. Particularly for things like interactive Gantt charts and some of the really complicated visualization components that had been a relative pleasure to design and code in Flash. But yeah, it was much easier to learn a new language paradigm knowing exactly what I needed to implement, rather than having to devise the logic at the same time.