hey,
i'm in 4th-year compsci (minor).. and it appears i've had a somewhat different experience ;)
i definitely agree with "they have a lot more learning to do." but.. i really don't think this is a bad thing.
it's mostly my experience with non-coding friends: looking at AS source, they can get the gist of what's what. this lets them gradually understand the basics in a more abstract setting. i.e they understand what a variable is.
they DON'T need to understand the 132586 niggling details about data types. when they move to c++, they _will_ need to learn this, but they'll probably find it easier to expand their knowledge of variables than to have to swallow both the abstract idea of what a variable IS, and million implementation-specific things about how variables work in c++, simultaneously.
i suppose my argument is, AS is better to learn in because it allows you to learn in small increments, from the very abstract to the very specific. in c++, both abstract concept and implementation are both sort of lumped together, and that makes it harder for people to grasp the specifics as simple implementations of a more eneral, abstract concept. like, it's harder to seperate the ideal thing from the way c++ handles the thing. but.. to each his own i suppose.
however, i think that AS is the future in terms of programming, because to be honest, i don't CARE about how the machine is storing my numbers, and i shouldn't HAVE to care -- eventually (hopefully), machines will be too complex for us to be able to really map our though-concepts onto physical processes in a meaningful way.
20 years ago, human-written asm ruled over compilers. now, most of the time the compiler wins, because CPU architecture is soooooo much more complex now -- we can no longer really fit all of the processes involved into our minds at the same time. but.. well, whatever. blahblahblah..
to me, the important part of programming is the abstract "devellop an algorithm to solve a problem" part, and actually expressing the algo in terms a computer can understand is sort of the boring, crappy, hopefully-soon-fully-automated task. [having said that, one course i'm taking right now is numerical methods, so i definitely see how sometimes, the implementation details need to influence the algo. but.. i don't agree that this is how things SHOULD be.]
aaaaaaaaanyway..
i know exactly what you mean about frame crap -- i HATED that shit. and then flashMX arrived, and guess what? now things work the way they should -- you can write an entire program all in a single text file, without doing anything flash-specific (i.e nomucking w/ movie clips, _all_ you need is a text file). woo!
also, you don't need flash to write in AS, there are a few 3rd party apps which will generate bytecode from txt. [and, just in case you miss c, you can hack the byte-code (as close as you get to assembly) with flasm.]
since the specs for AS are open, a lot of people have develloped various open tools..
aaanyway.. maybe it's simply due to lazyness on my part, but.. i prefer writing in AS to java/c++ simply because, most of the time i don't CARE about writing a "real" program, i care about the algos. like: does my solution work?
once i get a stable stack of boxes in my *!%$*% physics sim, THEN i'll worry about porting it to a real lang. until then, i want to be able to know that the instability is due to a problem with my approach/solution, and not simply a problem with my description of my solution.
okay, end of rant.
raigan