[haXe] OSCON

[Yariv Sadan]

Hi,

About Ruby vs. haXe, I'd like to say that the dynamic "tricks" that
Rails uses to bridge the semantic gap between the language and the
database could be emulated in a static language like haXe using code
generation. Admittedly, code generation isn't as "lean and mean" as
the dynamic class manipulation techniques in Ruby and it has an ugly
tentency to overwrite your hand-written modifications. Yikes.

I think haXe's uniqueness is the fact that it's a lightweight
statically compiled laguage that runs on practically all relevant
runtimes for webapps (Rails, by comparison, has limited Javascript
generation and no SWF generation AFAIK). Also, the debate between
static and dynamic typing will probably go on forever, but there's no
doubt that *some* developers prefer static typing, and there isn't a
good open source web-oriented OO language that supports static typing
besides haXe IMO. haXe's main competition is Java, which stuck in a
J2EE corporate mentality, and C#/Mono, which will always have the
Microsoft curse over its head :) haXe just feels more agile and fun
than both of them.

So, basically, I do think haXe has carved itself a good niche in the
database-driven webapp world despite the strengths of the entrenched
players. Besides that, I'm sure many develoeprs would rather use haXe
than Javascript and/or Actionscript even in applications that don't
use Neko on the server side (that's why I wrote the haXe remoting
adapter for Erlang :) ). But who knows, maybe I'm wrong and haXe will
eventually be most dominant as a desktop client language with
ScreenweaverHX and/or xinf -- only time will tell.

Cheers,
Yariv