Why macromedia... for love of god, why ?

Okay, so I decided to give flash programming a try. Around 2000 or so, I took a look AS, I was not impressed by what I saw. Now, in 2006 I took another look and though "hey, this is pretty nice". Thus, I thought I would whip up a few fun games with it. But as I am trying to do that, my rage at macromedia/AS is growing. I have extensive programmin experience in C, C++, Java, PHP and .NET and I am saddened by the fact that the flash platform and AS is the standard in which we must write "real time" interactive content for the web. Macromedia has done a huge disservice to programmer kind by making the flash platform in a way which requires you to engade in all kinds of wierd faggotry of the "Action Script" language to make programs in it.

Discuss.

>>14
Problem is, XML is *NOT* a protocol. Managers think if they have XML everything's done. Well, XML is a metalanguage, and it says nothing about how you should treat XML data. The problem of treating data is the same, only you're introducing an ugly, huge, slow parser in the way when you could just use the language's eval.

>>18
accidentally assigning to a misspelled variable
It's common in scripted languages. If this is the worst thing you can say about JavaScript, then it must be a great language. BTW, Python can help here, as you can still assign a value to a misspelt variable, but in many cases when accessing it you'll get an exception since you have to assign them first before referencing a variable, unlike PHP or Perl without strict, for example.