I think most of that is just misdirected Flash hate. Having worked with the source code to the Flash player, I understand better than most why Flash was hated,

I think most of that is just misdirected Flash hate. Having worked with the source code to the Flash player, I understand better than most why Flash was hated, but ActionScript wasn't bad (especially at 3.0), and the Flex framework for ActionScript had a lot of really sweet features like two-way binding with smart property re-evaluation that are just now becoming common in JavaScript via frameworks (though it also had some horrible stuff as well, not all roses). You may want to check out the haxe language as it borrows quite a lot from ActionScript 3 with tools that allow you to compile your haxe code down to JavaScript, AVM1 (AS2), AVM2 (AS3), C/C++, etc, and while it is a relatively niche language it is a lot more "alive" than ActionScript 3 currently is.