I still like Flash. It helped a lot of kids (myself included) get into computers, its authorship tools allowed non-programmers to create a lot of really cool animations and interactive things over the years, and technically it's still ahead of HTML5 in a lot of ways (the gap is slowly shrinking due to Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform, but I still find that most websites with even the slightest hint of superfluous animation lurch and stutter embarrassingly today on my fairly decked-out PC compared to full-blown Flash animations on my Pentium). If Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia, and if their management had had the good sense to release the source to the Flash player client, I think the web would be in a much better place right now.