The Joy of Haxe
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The Joy of Haxe
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Re: The Joy of Haxe
#2Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps.
It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community.
It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty painful to use in its early days; it shows the importance of positioning and marketing.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#3Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…
Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#4Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…
Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
Exactly, many of the new trendy languages have a corporation behind that can with money and by association get the language known.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#5Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…
Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
Exactly this; frankly, I think it's amazing that Haxe is as relatively well known as it is given it's humble origins at a once obscure* French game development studio.
It's not a surprise at all that the likes of Microsoft and Google and Mozilla are able to promote and push new languages to significant widespread adoption.
*Not so obscure anymore; Motion-Twin is well known for the hit game Dead Cells, and their former employee, Nicolas Cannasse, who is credited with inventing Haxe, went on to found his own studio with its own successful games (Northgard especially)
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#6Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…
Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
Counter-example: Dart.
If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these that drive spread of language, not "huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists." Dart had no short of those and still not much accepted.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
Counter-example: Dart. If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these…
Has Dart taken off? I think most people recoiled in horror when they saw the early-days "hello world" turn into millions of lines of generated code.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
Counter-example: Dart. If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these…
Dart had some other downsides, like you needed Java I think and many developers have an irrational disgust for Java(I hope I remember right)
There are other languages pushed by a big corporation that fail so having the big corporation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#9I first learned about Haxe through Lucas Pope’s dev log for “Papers, Please”. Sounded interesting and fun, though Pope (who developed PP on a Mac) said he also had written custom tooling for his work — maybe that situation had changed since 2014: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/209905/Road_to_the_IGF_L...
For his new game, Return of the Obra Dinn, he went with Unity because of its 3D capability:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0
> I'm gonna use Unity for this one. I fell in love with Haxe/OpenFL on my last project but unfortunately the 3D situation is not that great there yet. Also, it's time to finally see why 90% of the indie scene is using Unity. I have a good amount of experience with 3D games and the few days I've played around with Unity so far have been pretty productive. The animated title screen scene up there (with post-processing shaders and all) was created in one day. I now have unrealistically high hopes.
Re: The Joy of Haxe
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-example: Dart. If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these…
Has Dart taken off? I think most people recoiled in horror when they saw the early-days "hello world" turn into millions of lines of generated code.
Not that I'm aware of, no. I don't know, but it seems to me like WebAssembly is more promising for conveniently bringing all programming languages to web applications, rather than languages like Elm or Dart whose standard implementations compile to JavaScript and are designed only to program web applications.