I heard of the computer programming language haXe a long time ago when I discovered Neko.  At the time I wasn't at all interested in haXe, it was the lower-level Neko language that intrigued me.  I even set out to create a new web framework in Neko.  I made good progress before my busy life got the better of me.  This semester, as you know I'm taking Advanced Programming Languages and had to learn OCaml as part of the course.  I really like the power and expressivity of the language, but some reason it hasn't caught on mainstream.  My guess is the somewhat difficult syntax and the fact that it's a mostly functional language.  

Well, fast forward to now.  I had to learn haXe this week for work. (Not the first place I expected to learn a new language since we're still using PHP 4).  Adobe had released Flash 10 a little while ago and our file uploader that depended on a flash backend stopped working.  It has something to do with a new security policy and fact that we were using a javascript event to trigger the file dialog.  To make a long story short, I soon found that I would have to repimplement the entire button in flash to get around the new security rules.  I have never done much in flash except for some dabbling in SwishMax some years ago.  I first found Nicholas Canassee's mtasc compiler.  It seemed like a perfect fit.  Here was a small, fast open-source actionscript compiler that could allow me to write flash in my no-ide-and-no-propietary-stuff manner.  After a couple days of overtime trying to get to it work I finally realized that he hadn't finished the compiler and it didn't support event listeners.  These are needed to give the user any kind of feedback when uploading files so I had to scrap that project.

Then I noticed that haXe was the solution I needed.  The reason he had not finished mtasc was because he was working on haXe and it was better.  One day of overtime later I had converted my ActionScript 2.0 upload button to a small haXe program that targeted Flash 9.  It worked like a charm.  Now I decided to give the language a little more serious thought.  I went online and found there was one book on the language and it could be had cheap on Amazon, so I ordered the book.  While ordering the book my wife asked me how long haXe had been around, I didnt know, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.  While there I noticed that it has many of the features from Ocaml that I love.  The cool type system, and pattern matching are two of the important features.  Also being based on ECMA script it felt at home since I spend a lot of time programming in Javscript and love the language, but hate most implementations.

My wife even went on to correct part of the article for haXe in Wikipedia.  Keep in mind she's not a programmer or even a techie and here she is caring enough about some obscure programming language to bother correcting minor parts of the entry.  That's a cool wife!

I look forward to learning more about this seemingly perfect language after my book come in in a week and I finish 4 more school projects.


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