Flash CS5 code hinting not working?

Question

Just installed the new Flash CS5 trial and code hinting doesn't appear to be working! I have added all my custom class paths in to the AS3 source paths, but I don't get any code hinting for any of these just the same old code hinting you get in CS4. Am I doing something wrong or does it just not work?
UPDATE: If it helps, in the code editor i get a small yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in, in the bottom right hand corner. When I have over this it advises me:
" *** Unable to build code hint cache. Please save the associated FLA into a different folder. There are too many files on the classpath. *** "
This error message appears no matter what FLA/Class i open, and moving it makes no difference.
UPDATE: Problem solved, the "There are too many files on the classpath" was the clue! Slimmed down my library and all seems to work now.
However, this does bring me on to another question.. does anyone know how many class files flash can comfortably cache? I use some fairly chunky libraries in my work and am wondering if i'm going to find myself constantly slimming them down after a while?

Answer 1

The reason everyone gives for AS3 is that AS2 was buggy.
I don't think so. AS3 is a better language, better designed, more consistent, more powerful. I would switch to AS3 for that, not because of bugs - but I don't know what's the reason behind everyone's choice.
AS2 was not buggy, people were writing buggy scripts
AS2 was buggy. Maybe people were writing buggy scripts too, but believe me it was buggy. However AS3 is at the very least equally buggy. It is better designed, more consistent, but equally buggy in its implementation.
All software have bugs, but programming languages usually undergo a stricter and more thorough revision than other kinds of sofware because the consequences of bugs in a programming language are more disastrous.
But that's not the case of ActionScript. Maybe because of its history and its legacy, or maybe because Adobe was always dedicated to completely different kinds of software, like PhotoShop, Premiere and the like, and suddenly dove into the business of developing a programming language without having the know-how.
The level of bugginess of ActionScript is amazing. I work with actionscript daily and there's no day that I don't run 4 ot 5 times into some problem due to some bug. Not that I discover new bugs every day, just run into them - sometimes they are already reported, other times they are not.
Why should something that took one line of code (clicking on a movieClip
to move to a frame) now take 5 or more lines of code (creating a
listener object, assigning a listener object, writing a function).
It often happens that a language that is in the overall more elegant, consistent and compact, turns out to need a bit more of code for doing the simplest things. Maybe what could be done with 1 line of code now takes 5, but things that took 1000 lines of cumbersome awkward tricky and hacky code can now be done with just 100 of readable and simple-to-understand code.
When I first learned Java I was surprised at the quantity of code I had to write just to make a program that would print "hello world", while in most dialects of Basic it was just:
10 PRINT "Hello world"
Would you say Basic is superior to Java in any sense?
I teach Flash at a university, both beginner and advanced users. [...]
I'll stick to AS2 in my classes.
You should think about the damage you may be doing to your students. If they are going to use ActionScript professionally, they'll have to learn AS3, rather sooner than later. So why not save them the pain to do the effort twice? If instead you are teaching them AS just for didactic purposes (i.e. for learning programming in general) and don't care about practical applications and you don't like the way AS has evolved (i.e. AS3), then consider teaching them another language, instead of an obsolete version of a current one.
AS3 is not more complicated, or difficult to learn, or less designer-friendly or non-programmer-friendly than AS2. Not at all; rather the opposite. It is more complicated and difficult to learn when you already know AS2, because you feel like everything you knew is useless - but the same can be said about learning AS2 when you already know AS3. Starting from scratch, AS3 is indeed simpler.
But this have drifted OT, sorry. Back to the topic:
It's not an app killer, just a minor inconvenience
It's a major inconvenience if writing the same amount of code takes you three times the time it should take. That in 2010 you have to spell every single property/method/class name entirely from the first to the last letter, when most of the time it should be just a matter of typing a couple of characters and hit tab, is simply ridiculous. You may as well write your code with NotePad. Flash is (among other things) an IDE - something Adobe seemed to neglect up to recently; and when they finally decided to take a step into making it work like any other decent IDE, it does not work!!
There are bigger things to complain about.
On this you are definitely right.
Using their pretty remarkable products (where would we be without PS or
DW?) is not a right, it's a (sometimes frustrating) privilege.
It's a privilege you pay for. That's when it becomes a right.
So Adobe mods, we're frustrated but only because we're all loyal users who depend on your products
(emphasis is mine)
Exactly. That's the point.
Note there's been no helpful answer from them yet: that's how much they care about loyal users who depend on their products.