[jmileham]

I'm not an ActionScript hero, so I can't really weigh in on its awesomeness, but the fact that they rewrote it three times and ultimately ended up with a solid language is to be applauded but not surprising. If you were to put the perfect language and smartest compiler into (what I percieve to be) a somewhat kludgy proprietary environment like Adobe's present toolchain, that doesn't strike me as a recipe for win, though. If I'm wrong about the state of affairs there, feel free to educate me.

Dusting off the age-old interpreted vs. precompiled fight as a closing argument strikes me as a little weak as well. If raw runtime performance and the benefits of static typing were the ultimate measure of a language's utility, nobody would write Ruby.

The author would probably be wise to read up on disruptive innovation. The biggest mistake an incumbent can make is to overestimate the importance of the disruptor's weaknesses while the disruptor is busy eating the incumbent's lunch.