4 ms·

Haxe is what ActionScript should have been. However (imo), it's hard to find a niche for it now. What does it get me that Perl and OCaml don't? I've been drawn

by PeCaN 11y ago

Haxe is what ActionScript should have been. However (imo), it's hard to find a niche for it now. What does it get me that Perl and OCaml don't? I've been drawn to Haxe several times over the years, but have never really thought of a project, "huh, Haxe would be a great fit here". Maybe if I wrote a mobile game or something.

daurnimator 11y ago
The reason we started using it at work was we could target both Javascript and Flash from the one codebase. However, we finally don't need to support flash anymore... so now there's no reason to not just write in javascript.
- throwaway6845 11y ago
  I find Javascript is quite a good reason not to write in Javascript, but YMMV...
- sitkack 11y ago
  Haxe is still an excellent hedge. Js doesn't offer the same breadth of deployment targets.
- zem 11y ago
  from what little i've seen of haxe (used it for a few toy projects), it seems a lot more pleasant to program in and to maintain than javascript.
jdonaldson 11y ago
Haxe is really a formidable little virus. It does a lot of small things nicely, but doesn't have a single knock-out feature that you can trot out during language comparisons. However, all those little features add up over time and become addictive. You start really missing them when you go back to other languages. In the back of your mind you think of how you might solve something simply with abstracts or macros, or how you might easily reduce the file size or execution speed with dead code elimination or inlining. I would choose Haxe over Perl because of Haxe's expressive type extension capabilities. I could add useful methods to string or array types, and make the resulting code short and sweet (although perhaps less readable for others). I would choose Haxe over OCaml and I would gain Haxe's superior compiler error messages. I would also get to move seamlessly between functional and imperative programming styles, and still get to use ADTs.
- catnaroek 11y ago
  OCaml accommodates imperative programming just fine: `if` without `else`, `for` loops, single semicolons as statement delimiters (without enclosing statement blocks in parentheses), records and objects containing mutable data, etc. OCaml isn't like SML and Haskell, which <strike>do get in your way when you want to program imperatively</strike> push you a little bit more forcefully towards programming in a functional style. On the other hand, Haxe lacks features like higher order modules and signature ascription, which give the programmer very fine-grained control over the scope of abstractions. Haxe's abstract types are more like what ML had in the 70's, before MacQueen invented the ML module system.
  - jdonaldson 11y ago
    OCaml provides some nice syntactic sugar for imperative programming patterns like "if" statements. But, I wouldn't really call it an imperative language, as it has its roots firmly in ML (which is not such a bad thing after all). Arguing that ML had a precursor to Haxe abstract types is well within reason, but I'm not so sure they're the same. I'll have to do some more reading.

by PeCaN 11y ago

daurnimator 11y ago

The reason we started using it at work was we could target both Javascript and Flash from the one codebase. However, we finally don't need to support flash anymore... so now there's no reason to not just write in javascript.

throwaway6845 11y ago
I find Javascript is quite a good reason not to write in Javascript, but YMMV...
sitkack 11y ago
Haxe is still an excellent hedge. Js doesn't offer the same breadth of deployment targets.
zem 11y ago
from what little i've seen of haxe (used it for a few toy projects), it seems a lot more pleasant to program in and to maintain than javascript.

jdonaldson 11y ago

Haxe is really a formidable little virus. It does a lot of small things nicely, but doesn't have a single knock-out feature that you can trot out during language comparisons. However, all those little features add up over time and become addictive. You start really missing them when you go back to other languages. In the back of your mind you think of how you might solve something simply with abstracts or macros, or how you might easily reduce the file size or execution speed with dead code elimination or inlining. I would choose Haxe over Perl because of Haxe's expressive type extension capabilities. I could add useful methods to string or array types, and make the resulting code short and sweet (although perhaps less readable for others). I would choose Haxe over OCaml and I would gain Haxe's superior compiler error messages. I would also get to move seamlessly between functional and imperative programming styles, and still get to use ADTs.

catnaroek 11y ago
OCaml accommodates imperative programming just fine: `if` without `else`, `for` loops, single semicolons as statement delimiters (without enclosing statement blocks in parentheses), records and objects containing mutable data, etc. OCaml isn't like SML and Haskell, which <strike>do get in your way when you want to program imperatively</strike> push you a little bit more forcefully towards programming in a functional style. On the other hand, Haxe lacks features like higher order modules and signature ascription, which give the programmer very fine-grained control over the scope of abstractions. Haxe's abstract types are more like what ML had in the 70's, before MacQueen invented the ML module system.
- jdonaldson 11y ago
  OCaml provides some nice syntactic sugar for imperative programming patterns like "if" statements. But, I wouldn't really call it an imperative language, as it has its roots firmly in ML (which is not such a bad thing after all). Arguing that ML had a precursor to Haxe abstract types is well within reason, but I'm not so sure they're the same. I'll have to do some more reading.