before you can avoid bad habits, you have to know what they are AND why are they bad habits.
Frankly, I've seen just as much - if not more - bad code in Java or any other language as I've seen in PHP. In my experience, PHP with its bad name keeps you on your toes when it comes to bad coding practices, it can also give you hands on experience with why one approach is better than the other, something that Java for example (or any language where best practices are already identified for you) can't do.

Just so you know, the Clipboard.getData() points to the AIR documentation which is a very different beast when compared to the Flash browser plugin. Also flash apps in a web page are subject to cross domain security policies (see: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_9_security.pdf ), the added benefit is that the target domain is able to control who's allowed to make cross domain calls and who's not (by default no one is allowed, much like in a browser).

as a LAMP developer (where in my case P stands for PHP mostly) reading slashdot, I'm used to see a lot of PHP bashing whenever a story remotely related to PHP pops up. On this one there's hardly any PHP bashing at all. On a more on topic matter, dropping PHP4 support is great news, hopefully this will give the PHP team enough time to concentrate on what's missing in newest versions of PHP. This is my list:

- speed (there's a Google SoC project on this, but more could be done for example calling a function has a lot of overhead)
- >32bit machine independent integer support
- large file support >2Gb
- exceptions thrown by all internal functions


what's your list?