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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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zaptheimpaler ◴[12 Oct 25 08:20 UTC] No.45556394[source]▶
Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
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eloisant ◴[12 Oct 25 13:50 UTC] No.45558222[source]▶
I wish Flash would have died sooner.

It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser.

Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

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1. ethbr1 ◴[12 Oct 25 17:57 UTC] No.45560263[source]▶
Flash was the original web Excel (also Lotus 1-2-3) -- a simultaneous design + data + programming tool.

These are terrible for maintainability, but excellent for usability.

On the whole, I'd say it was easily a loss for the greater web that web programming left the citizen-programmer behind. (By requiring them all to turn into hamfisted front-end javascript programmers...)

Many of the centralized evils of the current web might have been avoided if there had remained an onramp for the neophyte to really create for the web.

I.e. Facebook et al. might have instead been replaced by a hosted, better-indexed Macromedia create + edit + host platform

Or the amount of shit code produced by inexperienced front-end devs throwing spaghetti at IE might have been reduced