You lost me at "Few people would argue that it (Javascript) is anything other than a half-baked toy language that does not scale well."
> "There is an alternative to serving up source code that works well in a growing number of situations, eg the JVM, CLR..."
Really? I'm not sure how much more "big enterprise" we can get... and having been writing a lot of JS as of late, and a lot of past experience with C#... doing the things you do with jQuery et al using C# would be a gigantic pain in the ass and create a morass of completely incomprehensible, unmaintainable code.
I've noticed something in this great big Flash vs. the World debate - the only people defending Flash appear to be Flash developers, and the only real motivation I've seen in the defense of Flash is self-preservation...
Not that I'd start a new project in Flash/Flex, but let's be realistic here.
What JS + CSS + HTML5 are missing is the tools and frameworks that make Flex such a great development platform. The tools will come, and it will not take 12 years. Detractors love to scoff at that number, but we all know that we're never going to let it take even close to that long.
If I were Adobe I'd stop fighting it and start building those tools now.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/adobe-cto-kevin-lynch-were-...