They tried. There were hundreds and hundreds of patches for Flash over its lifetime; sometimes there would be several in a single week.
More pedantic nit: Problems are Turing-complete, computational systems are Turing-equivalent. A problem is Turing-complete if it can’t be solved by any system less powerful than a Universal Turing Machine, and a computational system (programming language plus possibly-implied runtime, computing device) is Turing-equivalent if it has problem-solving ability equivalent to a Universal Turing Machine.
This distinction is pretty much universally ignored.
Ming really doesn’t get the respect he deserves. Ming the merciless was really great in Flesh Gordon, back in the 70’s.
This forum is educational, but I’m gonna have to think on this one.
If people care enough about keeping a particular program running and have the skill, they set up some kind of “Flash app” that runs the program they are trying to preserve on it. I’ve already run across that a few places.
Otherwise, the Flash-dependent program just stops working.
Don’t take my word for it. Goodmath has a good blog post on exactly this subject; he may use more mathematical notation but I think he’s pretty clear anyway.
We can rescue the notion of real-world programming languages being Turing-equivalent if we distinguish between the language’s specification and its implementation. That is, if a language doesn’t specify anything about only being able to access a specific amount of memory, or programs only being able to loop some pre-specified number of times known at compile time, then the language is Turing-equivalent, and otherwise not. This is more practical of a distinction than you may imagine: The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter technology, eBPF, allows programs to monitor various things going on in a computer by using special programs to pick out what they want to look at; the language those special programs are written in is not Turing-equivalent, which allows the eBPF system to know what they’re going to do ahead of time and absolutely guarantees that they’re not going to go nuts and consume an unbounded amount of memory or CPU time. The unsolvability of the Halting Problem prevents any such guarantee from being made of a program written in a Turing-equivalent programming language.
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Say it ain’t so!
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Guess I haven’t been keeping up with my drinking for a few years.
As to Flash… once it is truly dead and buried then middle age folks who have been addicted to Flash based games for a decade or more will go into withdrawal. We’re gonna need that Zima. And now that is gone too! :eek:
But I can think of almost nothing but a couple games I play that uses Flash. Haven’t otherwise seen it in the wild in a few years. Most folks are unlikely to notice when it is gone and the internet will just keep evolving.
If Flash goes away, so does the original Homestar Runner! (Yes, the Strongbad Emails are available on YouTube, but they lose their interactivity.)
Zima made a comeback a couple years ago, for a limited time. So just wait another 15 years and you’re good.
If you Google “flash to html5” you’ll find a lot of resources to update stuff. Even Adobe has a how-to using their software. But a lot of older sites may not expend resources on doing this … so buh-bye.