DEV Community

Discussion on: If you were designing a programming language what would your favourite features be?

Collapse
 
dansilcox profile image
Dan Silcox

Thanks for your post, I knew I was going to learn so much by asking this question - never even heard of Haxe! I like the example and I agree that native ADT (or at the very least enum) support is definitely better than using user-land sub-classing for the same thing.

Yes I've heard good things about SmallTalk too, but never used it myself.

Collapse
 
bootcode profile image
Robin Palotai

Haxe is a curiosity I would say - compiler written in Ocaml, compiles very fast, and has a balanced feature set. Has both server- and client-side runtimes (lots of targets actually).

I used it in the past when developed flash games, it (the language) was cleanly superior to ActionScript. ActionScript (and flash) on the other hand came with the Adobe IDE (don't remember the name), and people more interested in writing games than in programming languages produced more shiny stuff. Classic fallacy, writing game engine instead of game..

The limiting factor last time I looked at it was the cross-platform graphics stuff (Neash/NME), which tried to stuff the gfx API behind a flash-like interface. The experience was not always smooth on all targets. Wonder how that fares today.

The original developers, Motion Twin used it in a full-stack fashion. It backed most of their games AFAIK, for example Die2Nite. It seems the author (Nicolas Cannassee, @ncannassee) is up to something again, see youtube.com/watch?v=SfwLOOkcSfo.