Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement. Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything replace it properly. I weep for today's children, is there a good alternative? I mean, a program where you can scribble, make a movie clip out of it and make it move with code, just like that. And then publish it on the internet effortlessly.
Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which" ... was way inferior to AS3. AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was later abandoned by JS vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly inferior to AS3.
I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.
I started to learn AS3 but quickly transitioned to other technologies because even back then, the end of flash was forseeable. I liked AS3 but it was time to move on for a variety of reasons, among them a desire to have more control over hardware accelerated rendering and general performance concerns.
Fun fact: At university, a teaching assistant at "Introduction to programming" asked in which languages we've programmed before and I said ActionScript and he said that is not a programming language :)
