What is the future of AS2?

I'd like to get some thoughts on this from people. Like for example, How Important is it to learn AS2 if you are in the process learning AS3?

I started learning AS3 about a year ago with minimal knowledge of AS2. I have spent the last year just focusing solely on AS3 and as I continue my education in flash programming is there any substantial benefits from spending any time on AS2? The way I've been looking at it is, if I'm going to learn a new technique in Flash I might as well learn in it AS3.

Any thoughts?

Thx.

What is the future of AS2?

It depends partly on your plans for the present and the future.?I you plan to be doing freelance design work, then learning AS2 may become more of a necessity than a wishful bit of thinking.?You may end up inheriting older projects that need revisions or new features.?While the same could be said were you to be working for some functional group of some large firm, chances are more likely you would be developing new things rather than changing old things, so learning old things becomes less necessary.?Still, in any situation it is always good to have some ability to speak another language.

The good thing about learning AS3 is that you are still learning some of the unique coding elements that relate solely to Flash design.?And knowing them, you become knowledgeable as to what capabilities might exist and what you might need to look for in older versions of the language.?My view of programming and learning languages is... you learn coding concepts and capabilities that can be iinherantly applied to new languages... it is just a matter of determining what syntax/code a new language uses to do what you know it should be able to do based on experience with another language.

What is the future of AS2?

I agree with Ned on this one. Although AS2 might be starting to die now, but there are still ALOT of apps and websites that are totally built in AS2, and you might actually need work with those ''old'' projects or even translate them to AS3. Personally I do not know AS2 and I'm not planning to spend time on it, at least not before I finish learning all that I need to learn in AS3. But just like Ned said, when you learn the main concepts of programming, learning other languages becomes very easy. For example, after learning how to program in AS3, I started learning ASP.NET which then lead to learning C#. When I started learning C# I found that to be a piece of cake especially after noticing how close the syntax of C# is to that of Actionscript (could be close to AS2 though).

I have a lot on my to-do list now, including learning 3D animation, After Effects, JavaScript, AJAX, expanding my PHP %26amp; MySQL knowledge and much more. Maybe when I'm done with this list, I might find the time for AS2... there's no hurt from learning something anyway

I agree that in this field you should try and learn as much as you can but I feel spending any time learning AS2 is a waste of time when it makes more sense to put all my efforts into AS3 and not to mention the laudry list of other programs and languages to learn that are more pressing.

But I hear what you're saying Ned, I mainly freelance so I have run into some client files that are in AS2.

Thanks guys for the input.

All you need to know about AS2 is that there's no new MovieClip() but you use createEmptyMovieClip() instead.

There's no Sprite class and probably the most important thing:

events are dispatched in the scope of the object they are attached to, rather than in the scope they were created in.

If that doesn't make any sense, google AS2 Delegate.

Other than that, if you know AS3, don't bother with AS2. If you ever get handed an AS2 project you should be able to figure things out, without in depth knowledge of AS2. It's not like they're 2 different languages (e.g. PHP vs Java).