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Well JavaScript was supposed to be a glue between browsers and Java Applets.

Steve Jobs decided differently when he hated on ActionScript.

10 years ago this sentence probably would have start a flame war. ;-)

Jobs’ complaint wasn’t actionscript the language, it was the security and performance nightmare of the Flash runtime.

Though it’s hard to imagine what the web would look like if the language had become the standard. JS is a pain but AS was even less suitable for general purpose compute.

And at least the "performance nightmare" is an irony from today's perspective as the Flash player wasn't actually slow at all! It was the incapability of the Safari browser to handle plugins in a good way and on mobile devices. Today's implementations of mobile application, JavaScript heavy applications and websites are much much more performance heavy.

ActionScript3 was a very suitable language.

Flash performance was also hit or miss on Linux.

Eh, language was fine, runtime was pretty bad.

And yet it pays my bills for almost two decades.

Probably wasn't supposed to either :-)

Nice gatekeeping. :-)