So what's the future for us Flash Developers? - yes it's that question again....

[Barna Biro]

EA Sports, which I understand to be a pretty successful company, uses AS2 exclusively for its HUD (Heads Up Display). Matter of fact they were hiring in Orlando a couple of months ago asking specificly for AS2 experienced developers. The job title was interface developer or something but it was all about AS2 work.

That's a significantly different scenario than what we were talking about... and as a note: they kinda use AS 3.0 for everything else ( their Facebook games, Adobe Air based games for smartphones / tablets, etc. ) Just because a known company still uses an old technology for it's ( most likely ) legacy projects, it doesn't automatically qualify the technology / language / framework as "alive and doing well". Heck, there are tons of large corporations using languages / frameworks / tools that 90% of us haven't even heard about or had no way of hearing about since it was developed from the ground up by them to resolve specific problems and it's not publicly available ( yet / if ever )... and although used, I'd hardly call these things "alive" ( freelancers and the "general programmer public" can't care any less about them when it comes to paying the monthly bills or trying to get a new contract / project ).

Just saying... your AE example, although probably true, it's far from comforting to freelancers ( and not only ) once analysed / look at properly. No one said "AS 2.0 is inexistent", but although existing, it still can be quite "dead" ( which it kinda is and the situation will get worse and worse with future releases -> just refer to the Adobe technology roadmap for 2013 and onward ).