It seems to me this is a discussion on two levels: statically versus dynamically/weakly typed languages in general, and ActionScript versus JavaScript in particular.
Concerning the first aspect, the most important advantage I see in static typing is not that is finds bugs (tests are better in that discipline), but that it leads to much better IDE support. Only in a statically typed language, the IDE can definitely find out which class, method or field your code actually refers to, which allows for code navigation, documentation lookup, and last but not least intelligent refactoring support.
Concerning ActionScript versus JavaScript, I must say that I like and respect JavaScript a lot and want to keep its "good parts" (a la Crockford), but I also want to be able to take advantage of static typing for the reasons given above. Thus, although the company I work for is not affiliated with Adobe in any way (rather on the contrary), we were looking for the statically typed language that is closest to JavaScript and finally chose ActionScript 3. We then built a cross-compiler from ActionScript to JavaScript years before Adobe/Bernd Paradies did. We have improved and been working with this tool since 2004 (starting with JavaScript 2/ECMAScript 4) and never regretted following this approach. In contrast to Adobe's tool, "Jangaroo" is Open Source and ready to use now. It focuses on integrating with, not replacing JavaScript, and we help solve problems like dependency management for JavaScript and reuse such solutions for generated JavaScript code. Jangaroo's generated JavaScript code does not look like assembly language, but as much as the AS3 source code as possible.
It's not always black or white, I believe we can use the best of both worlds!
Concerning the first aspect, the most important advantage I see in static typing is not that is finds bugs (tests are better in that discipline), but that it leads to much better IDE support. Only in a statically typed language, the IDE can definitely find out which class, method or field your code actually refers to, which allows for code navigation, documentation lookup, and last but not least intelligent refactoring support.
Concerning ActionScript versus JavaScript, I must say that I like and respect JavaScript a lot and want to keep its "good parts" (a la Crockford), but I also want to be able to take advantage of static typing for the reasons given above. Thus, although the company I work for is not affiliated with Adobe in any way (rather on the contrary), we were looking for the statically typed language that is closest to JavaScript and finally chose ActionScript 3. We then built a cross-compiler from ActionScript to JavaScript years before Adobe/Bernd Paradies did. We have improved and been working with this tool since 2004 (starting with JavaScript 2/ECMAScript 4) and never regretted following this approach. In contrast to Adobe's tool, "Jangaroo" is Open Source and ready to use now. It focuses on integrating with, not replacing JavaScript, and we help solve problems like dependency management for JavaScript and reuse such solutions for generated JavaScript code. Jangaroo's generated JavaScript code does not look like assembly language, but as much as the AS3 source code as possible.
It's not always black or white, I believe we can use the best of both worlds!