I lucked into a crash-course in Action Script at work this week, taking a photography browsing feature our designer mocked up and realizing a prototype in Flash instead of JavaScript. It’s going quite well in that I started with with a head devoid of AS knowledge and expect to finish it by the end of the week.
I generally code with text editors rather than IDEs, so typing in the blank slate of the Actions window comes a lot more naturally to me than twiddling movie frames ever did. I think it’s kind of amusing that the JavaScript and ActionScript languages vie for dominance of the rich application environment, since they resemble each other so strongly and apparently stem from the same source. Switching over is like converting between religions that have a shared holy book, or something. (I mean, it’d be like that if programming wasn’t kinda sciencey.)
