Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and then other aspects of computers.
That era of discovery and expression was something special.
I had a similar experience. I learned ActionScript pretty early on (around age age 16 or so) because it was easier to get something visual built than any other thing I had used, while still feeling like "real" programming.
AS3 is actually quite a pleasant language to work in, and while I'm glad that I don't need to muck with Flash plugins anymore, I do miss how easy it was to get something built when I was just bored and wanted to make a new toy.
For me, nothing has really come along to replace Flash in regards to the "tangible" feelings you get. JS and WebGL and Canvas and whatnot are great, and definitely lead to better results in regards to the user experience, but I feel that they're a lot harder to "pick up and play".
Also, it was really easy to reverse engineer a flash file. One could just import the .fla file into flash and see a lot of stuff that was going behind the scene - assets and action scripts were easily available to explore. This was my favourite way to get better at flash; I would go to templatemonster.com and browse through all the cool flash websites they had, then navigate to the temp folder of IE and then copy paste all the .fla files into my own personal folder for later dissection.
Same here. Neil Cicierega and Weebl's crazy antics are what got me interested in basic programing way back when I was 12-13. From there I started doing more and more complicated things in Actionscript. Sure I didn't learn any theory and produced awful code -- but I got a conceptual idea of programming that has helped me feel comfortable tackling new languages today.
Making a dance video to Monty Python's "Camelot" song is what made me learn about sprite sheets and motion techniques. It encouraged me to start googling different camera angles to figure out how to frame my shots.
That's why I love seeing kids playing with Minecraft, as it contains many of the same elements that I was playing with when I was a kid. Now if we could only get them into Dwarf Fortress, THEN we'd be talking. :) Speaking of which, that steam launch is supposed to be soon.
Flash is also what got me into programming. I started by making incredibly shitty knockoffs of stick figure videos on YouTube in flash mx 2004, then realized it also had the power to make games, and it went from there
That era of discovery and expression was something special.