WWX2015 videos !

[clemos]

Hi list,

Here are links to the first WWX2015 video, which is Nicolas' talk:

http://www.silexlabs.org/10-years-of-haxe-10-things-i-like/
https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/622440090355281920

Other WWX2015 videos should be published every 2 days.

Enjoy :)

Clément

[Justin L Mills]

Clement

I hope you guys don't get round to processing the Quaxe video... because
it was not really on Quaxe was it! It was a big dissappointment, rather
than talking about the actual code in his repository, how to set it up
etc... He just went on a rant around his personal opinions on Haxe
community and was more about controversy with views that seemed very
aligned to his personal use case and I felt contributed negatively.

On asking more about his opensource code with him directly, he made it
quite clear that he wanted to extend it in a probably more closed source
way and down played the opensource code that was working fine in his
repository - so to me the talk was not as advertised, and if speakers go
off on a silly tangent I don't see any point in processing them for
prosperity, in my opinion it was an abuse of his slot.

The critism he wanted to make has already been streamed so it's not like
anything is been hidden, but I don't see any value to putting it on
WWX2015, if he wants to record a video actually about setting up and
using Quaxe and submit it then that would be more approriate, otherwise
I hope you guys don't waste your valuable time preparing that video.

Maybe we could have a show of hands on who is quite happy with that one
not being published then maybe next time all the speaker who registered
to talk on opensource code will stick to doing that and not use it as a
platform for there own unfactual agendas!

For many of us we spend hard earned personal money to come to Paris to
discuss our Haxe projects and ideas in a positive way and many of us
have contributed towards sponsorship from our personal wages, only a
very few of us get corporate sponsorship to attend the Haxe conference
so for me the Quaxe talk was disrespectfull to many of us who had spent
our personal hard earned money, and also to people who may have wanted
to provide talks on thier opensource Haxe projects and maybe were not
able to because he had taken a slot.

I don't think the speaker really thought through that people like me
spend our holiday money to come to the Haxe conference and really don't
have much time for new users that have not put the time to truely learn
about the community before being deconstructive, this was self evident
by his limited understanding of who contributes to the main code base.

So my vote is to not process the Quaxe talk unless a more relevant Quaxe
video is submitted.

Best

Justin

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[Benjamin Dasnois]

Hi,

I actually believe that, amongst all the conferences I've seen during the latest WWX, Daniel's talk was the most valuable. Why? Because he was the only one to openly question the way "the community", or I should say "the project", is managed as a product.

A lot of people in the Haxe community seem to forget it but Haxe should be seen as a product and should be managed as such. As long as this is not the case there is no chance for Haxe's usage around the world, and most importantly because we all have bills to pay, in companies, to grow.

As far as I'm concerned, this talk was the only one presenting a vision for the Haxe Project and this is exactly what I expect from talks on Saturday and Sunday because they are not supposed to be workshops.

Also, no you can't just hide something because you didn't like it, and this is exactly one of the issues that clearly appeared during subsequent conversations to this talk.

And for the record : I did pay for my journey and accommodation.

Regards,

--

DASNOIS Benjamin
http://www.benjamindasnois.com

[Daniel Glazman]

On 19/07/2015 11:53, Justin L Mills wrote:

> Clement
>
> I hope you guys don't get round to processing the Quaxe video... because
> it was not really on Quaxe was it! It was a big dissappointment, rather
> than talking about the actual code in his repository, how to set it up
> etc... He just went on a rant around his personal opinions on Haxe
> community and was more about controversy with views that seemed very
> aligned to his personal use case and I felt contributed negatively.

Wow.

My talk's title was "Quaxe, infinity and beyond", right?
The part about Quaxe itself was 11 slides long, the second part about
the Haxe ecosystem was 7 or 8 slides long so less than the Quaxe part.

> On asking more about his opensource code with him directly, he made it
> quite clear that he wanted to extend it in a probably more closed source
> way and down played the opensource code that was working fine in his

I have always said the largest part of Quaxe will be OSS but I'll keep
some bits private to keep a competitive advantage. So what? Is this a
religious war because my company wants to reach some ROI and think it
cannot be reached from a totally OSS product? Seriously?

> repository - so to me the talk was not as advertised, and if speakers go
> off on a silly tangent I don't see any point in processing them for
> prosperity, in my opinion it was an abuse of his slot.
>
> The critism he wanted to make has already been streamed so it's not like
> anything is been hidden, but I don't see any value to putting it on
> WWX2015, if he wants to record a video actually about setting up and
> using Quaxe and submit it then that would be more approriate, otherwise
> I hope you guys don't waste your valuable time preparing that video.

Ahem, to say the least.

> Maybe we could have a show of hands on who is quite happy with that one
> not being published then maybe next time all the speaker who registered
> to talk on opensource code will stick to doing that and not use it as a
> platform for there own unfactual agendas!
>
> For many of us we spend hard earned personal money to come to Paris to
> discuss our Haxe projects and ideas in a positive way and many of us
> have contributed towards sponsorship from our personal wages, only a
> very few of us get corporate sponsorship to attend the Haxe conference
> so for me the Quaxe talk was disrespectfull to many of us who had spent
> our personal hard earned money, and also to people who may have wanted
> to provide talks on thier opensource Haxe projects and maybe were not
> able to because he had taken a slot.

I am sorry if you caught it that way, but my opinion is that the Haxe
ecosystem is (was?) bugged by a list of issues that have to be first
raised then second discussed in public. Hiding the dust under the carpet
won't help.

US engineers have, beyond our talents, the duty to say/write when we
think something has issues. Even if we pay the price for that, even if
the message is not well received, it's part of engineering to speak out.
I repeat: too speak out. Suggesting solutions is something else.
Solutions cannot be discussed if the issues are not acknowledged first.
Raising the issues w/o immediate solution is then perfectly acceptable
if you're a good enough engineer. The only managers who reply "I don't
want to hear problems but only solutions" are the ones the
corporate machinery does not need: it runs alone pretty well without
them.

You received the message badly. Ok. You didn't like the message. Ok. You
did not like the Quaxe part. Ok too. But never ever block the message
if you're an engineer.
For the record only, last time it happened at NASA, Challenger
exploded; the whistleblowing engineer was right, the joints had
issues:-)

> I don't think the speaker really thought through that people like me
> spend our holiday money to come to the Haxe conference and really don't
> have much time for new users that have not put the time to truely learn
> about the community before being deconstructive, this was self evident
> by his limited understanding of who contributes to the main code base.

OMG.
Of course, I have no idea what you've been through... How dare I?

More seriously, I have been myself many years an Invited Expert to the
CSS Working Group flying to CSS WG face-to-face meetings all over the
world on my own personal budget. Parts of the meetings were outside of
my personal scope of interest. That's part of the game.

While you spent your holiday money in that trip to Paris, I was myself
so sick I should have cancelled my talk (ask the SilexLabs people, they
know about it). I confirmed my talk, because I thought it was important
to meet with the community, explain what is Quaxe, give my point of
view on the ecosystem. I came sick, coughing, with fever, a hoarse
voice and a congestioned nose. But I came because I care about Haxe.
If you want to hear only positive stuff and never hear negative
messages, I recommend Disneyland Paris, reachable by subway from
Mozilla offices.

> So my vote is to not process the Quaxe talk unless a more relevant Quaxe
> video is submitted.

Since you spoke of OSS above, I think this is the very first time in 25
years of involvement in open source I see anyone - I repeat ANYONE -
claim a conference talk should not be made public. Again, if you hated
my talk, that's absolutely fine by me. But making it invisible to
others, only of its kind in the whole set of talks, only because you
hated it is called censorship, nothing less. If you wanted to
demonstrate something is flawed here, I think you're spot on.
Congrats.

Freedom of speech anyone?

</Daniel>

[Hugh]

We have seen and heard a lot of words about "what is wrong with haxe..." - a few more will not make a difference.

For those tempted to write further about "what is wrong with haxe...", or even "what is wrong with people talking about what is wrong with haxe..." (guilty) please ensure that you also contribute a equal or greater number of positive words about haxe in for form of tutorials, blog posts, tweets, test cases, documentation pull requests etc etc.  Possibly with a link for every post on the subject to show that you genuinely want to help (here is my penance for raising the topic http://gamehaxe.com/2015/07/16/cross-compile-from-mac-to-linux-with-hxcpp/) 

Meanwhile, let us appreciate the positive things announced in this subject here - the videos are coming on line!

Hugh

[Jason O'Neil]

Congrats on beginning the videos roll-out!

I look forward to catching up on the talks I missed and re-watching the ones that had too much good stuff to take in in just 45 minutes :)

--

[Franco Ponticelli]

Yes, bring the videos! :)

[Daniel Glazman]

On 20/07/2015 03:52, Hugh wrote:

> For those tempted to write further about "what is wrong with haxe...",
> or even "what is wrong with people talking about what is wrong with
> haxe..." (guilty) please ensure that you also contribute a equal or
> greater number of positive words about haxe in for form of tutorials,
> blog posts, tweets, test cases, documentation pull requests etc etc.

http://is.gd/D74fv5 ?

</Daniel>

[Itzik Arzoni]

For what it worth, this little quote blew some minds in my company...

[David Elahee]

Come on guys ! Even if Daniel can seem excessive to us long "installed" people, he is totally right to shake the whole thing too ! I personnaly had multiple fights with him, yet we need his input.

Denying him the video session will not make anything better, we have to work on haxe and foundation, not on how to tear the community. 

Every community need idea shaker and if Daniel took the seat at this time, its his freedom and it is laudable, I took the liberty to go vocal too many times, you too and everyone will go through this stage at some point :) 

So let's welcome Daniel to the vocalist club even if he shouts very passionately ;)

Cheers !

2015-07-20 10:04 GMT+02:00 Itzik Arzoni <itzi...@gmail.com>:

For what it worth,  this little quote blew some minds in my company...

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David Elahee

[tom rhodes]

Thanks so much for the video, looking forward to the rest.

Nicholas' talk, the tone of it and everything, the setting too a bit, just really brought home how much Haxe has matured since I started playing with it (5 or 6 years ago now). The slow and sure growth approach with a focus on what is best for the language first is paying dividends and will continue to do so.

Chapeau.

[Jean-Baptiste Richardet]

Just to avoid more noise around this, here is Silex Labs' official position:

"We at Silex Labs don't want to go down the road of censorship. Every speaker have something to give to the community, even if it doesn't like it. That's to each one to decide if it will watch it or not.

We won't alter or delete any videos, except for bug or aesthetics reasons. 

 

The Silex Labs Team"

 

This said, enjoy the videos and spread it as much as you can ;)

Jean-Baptiste Richardet
Silex Labs secretary

[Justin Donaldson]

I don't think it's a bad thing to criticize the community, and suggest ways to improve it.  After all, most of us have done that and stuck around.

I don't even think it's a bad thing to use a portion of your talk's timeslot to go on a tangent.  After all, you're just sacrificing your time that could be better spent discussing your project.

The only thing that's a bit off about this is the fact that the project (Quaxe) is not completely open source.  I think it's a bit tone deaf to criticize the community in one slide, and then pitch part of a paid product in another.  After all, perhaps that whole presentation is just a stunt designed to bring more attention to a product?  It's pretty easy to criticize something, it's a  lot harder to try and do something about it.  I suppose I'll think differently about this whole thing if Daniel takes more of an active role in trying to fix the things he criticizes.

Best,

-Justin

[Daniel Glazman]

On 20/07/2015 17:02, Justin Donaldson wrote:

> I don't even think it's a bad thing to use a portion of your talk's timeslot to go on a tangent. After all, you're just sacrificing your time that could be better spent discussing your project.

I never did that. My talk was discussed with SL and it has always been
said it would deal part with my project and part with my perception of
the Haxe world. AFAIC, the WWX 2015 schedule [1] said about it:

With a very strong current focus on the Gaming industry, Haxe remains
unknown outside of that inner circle. App developers outside of that
industry lack important foundations to let them approach the Haxe
environment, and the Haxe ecosystem remains a bit too unclear to
them. Daniel Glazman willl explain his views in the talk “Quaxe,
infinity and beyond”, almost with an external eye, of the situation
and how it could be fixed.

I don't think it can be clearer. I did _not_ diverge from an original
topic 100% about Quaxe. Dealing with the situation of the Haxe ecosystem
has always been on the radar for my talk.

> it. I suppose I'll think differently about this whole thing if Daniel
> takes more of an active role in trying to fix the things he criticizes.

- I suggested some technical changes to Haxe that did not seem really
welcome. I said that the XML parser in Haxe is far from minimal,
I'm working on my own that will be OSS. I said Haxe's regular
expressions miss a few flags, Nicolas rejected them. I said Haxe
misses a full xplatform UI stack based on markup language, I'm
working on it.
I also said that the more Haxe diverges from EcmaScript, the more
it harms its market penetration. Not in my hands, sorry.
I think too many things in Haxe (the language itself) are too geeky
and away from the mainstream solutions in other languages. Getting
rid of Flash compatibility does not seem to me a question of 'if' but
only a question of 'when'.

- Nicolas asked me to give my list of interesting conferences,
important tech web sites, list of local newspapers, names of
journalists I know in person and Press Releases proxies.

That information was sent to Nicolas 09-jun-2015. Done.

I don't think a PR was sent after the end of WWX2015 and we're almost
two months later. Haxe has not been mentioned a single time in tech
media world-wide in the last two months. Has anyone around me
outside of the gaming industry mentioned Haxe in the last two
months? No.
You don't expect me to pay for the Press Releases while there is
a Haxe Foundation for that, do you?

- I am of course 100% ready to contribute to a development strategy for
Haxe. As of today, Haxe is a geeky solution for geeks who use it as
dogfood (in the software industry's sense of the word). Some companies
made a big bet investing on Haxe and that's very nice. But it remains
an epiphenomenon; I can certainly help make it spread, but not at
no cost: I will recommend changes, I will recommend drops, I will
recommend actions. If Haxe is not ready for some important changes and
some major actions, my contributions - and others' contributions -
will be only a waste of time and energy. We need to put all the issues
on the table, and discuss them one by one without ANY taboo or any
political correctness. I won't care if I offend you, I won't care if
you don't like the message I am carrying. I need to carry that message
perhaps exactly because you don't like it and are not willing to
listen to it. On the tech side, I can file a bug for a RFE you dislike
or even hate, but I can file that bug. It does not say it will be
fixed, it says it can be discussed even if you hate it. Same thing
here.
And I may dislike replies or find them offending and I hope the
repliers won't stop because of that. Because if we enter a war room
during two days to define and apply a strategy, I don't expect anyone
in that room to remain silent. Ok for you?

"Active". Ok. I'm then suggesting a strategy meeting about Haxe here
in France, because of the presence here of both the HF and SL. Call it
a Bretton Woods of Haxe if you wish. Modulo my mandatory travels for
the CSS Working Group, I'll make sure to attend and present a plan *if
and only if* the following conditions are met:

1. HF attends
2. SL attends
3. anyone can attend, in the limits of the meeting room's size.
4. freedom of speech is fully respected
5. we have minute taker(s) grabbing a full verbatim of ALL THE CHATS
and sending them to the whole community as soon as the meeting has
ended, for both information and comment. The minutes will be taken
on IRC, so anyone joining on IRC at that moment will be able to
follow the discussion in real-time.
6. we finally get the *full* financial report for HF. Without knowing
precisely the budget constraints of the HF financial chapter per
financial chapter, making a plan, any plan, is hard if not
impossible.

Please note the 4 first items above represent pretty well WWX 2015.
Unfortunately, the HF Board meeting was... private, right?

Haxe Foundation and SilexLabs, who can host that Bretton Woods of Haxe?
And when (starting in september I guess)?

[1] http://www.silexlabs.org/wwx2015-schedule-and-speakers/

</Daniel>

[Benjamin Dasnois]

Can't say it any better than Daniel just did… I may just add "7. Room size should not be used as an artificial way to limit who can attend" (yes, tells how much faith in the community right now as we're discussing these issues) and "8. It's got to be made clear how the HF is managed and who is on-board".

Also, can we stop always saying "instead of criticising act"? Cause criticising already is acting, but people in front have to be open to changes and willing to act themselves.

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DASNOIS Benjamin
http://www.benjamindasnois.com

[Victor / tokiop]

Thanks for the videos and your work Silex Team. Pretty curious about
Quaxe, it looks like a very useful tool !

Cheers,

victor

[Philippe Elsass]

Good job - bright and clear videos this year!

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Philippe

[Johann]

On Monday, July 20, 2015 at 6:13:03 PM UTC+2, Daniel Glazman wrote:

 

  I think too many things in Haxe (the language itself) are too geeky
  and away from the mainstream solutions in other languages.

... 

Getting rid of Flash compatibility does not seem to me a question of 'if' but
  only a question of 'when'.

...

 

... Haxe is a geeky solution for geeks  ..

I can certainly help make it spread, but not at
  no cost: I will recommend changes, I will recommend drops, I will
  recommend actions. If Haxe is not ready for some important changes and
  some major actions, my contributions - and others' contributions -
  will be only a waste of time and energy.

...
</Daniel>

Hi Daniel. 

Not long ago you predicted Haxe's eventual death in case it doesn't become (more) "ES compatible", and you did so without even trying to define your concept of "ES compatibility", except that you'd like to be able to copy/paste JS code, which, thankfully, and for obvious reasons to anyone familiar with both Haxe's and ES' semantics, is and will only ever be possible to a certain extent. 

You also present wild speculations about the reasons for the currently relatively low adoption of the language, as well as conditions for future adoption of Haxe by JS developers, as facts. 

You further proclaim that Haxe had 'been "trying", since inception, to be "better" than JS' which is about as accurate as saying that Haskell is "trying" to be "better" than PHP; 

You follow up with baseless assumptions about how "Flash compatibilty" would be harming Haxe and "maintaining it in a state where it cannot reach its full potential". 

Finally, and perhaps most telling, you "100% agreed" to removing abstracts from the language.

And all that without mentioning the terms "types", "type-system", or "type-safety" even once. 

You're not the first and you certainly won't be the last random person stepping into Haxe, who, based on some limited background, is 

- misidentifying the nature of Haxe,

- missing sufficient exposure to substantial parts of the influences that shape[d] its design to even recognize them, let alone to appreciate their impact and usefulness,

- getting fundamental features, properties and policies of the language wrong. 

Which by itself would be completely fine, since for every newcomer, Haxe is unlike anything they've ever seen before. But you're then, based on these misconceptions and premature assumptions, demanding that Haxe should be limited to the subset of its features, paradigms and application domains that your limited imagination suggests, while, of course, predicting a bright future if only and only if Haxe followed your proposals.

It's not easy to identify the productive elements amongst the inconsistencies, speculations, misconceptions and outright FUD you're putting forward, and I'd usually be inclined to just ignore all that if it wasn't for your sense of entitlement in lecturing the community by your, to put it politely, intellectually boring appeals to self-perceived authority. 

Before dumping even more of your "expertise", let alone taking the lead in a strategy meeting, it would certainly be wise to acquire a basic understanding of the language you're dealing with. The aspects of Haxe that you call "too geeky" set Haxe apart, and provide learning opportunities for programmers from almost every background. Put to good use, they will help create an ecosystem of quality software that the ECMAScript world can only dream of. Haxe's competitors are not ECMAScript and friends, you rather find them among the likes of Ocaml, Haskell, Rust and Scala. 

regards, Johann

[Justin L Mills]

Silex

Could we add Johann's comments in the interest in free speech below Daniel's video to clarify the contention with a link to this thread, otherwise I feel that the video is misrepresenting Haxe as Johann has explained.


Victor

Quaxe is interesting, the instructions for setup are on Quaxe.com in case you missed them eg:
<Quote>

• install my own build of waxe; in a terminal type
  • cd <a_safe_place>
  • git clone https://github.com/therealglazou/waxe
  • cd waxe
  • git checkout WebView
  • haxelib dev waxe <a_safe_place>/waxe
• build my example (and don't forget to look at the trivial source):
  • cd <a_safe_place>/waxe/samples/04-Simple
  • haxelib run nme test Simple.nmml windows

</Quote>
I explored it before the conference and I did not find anything in the talk that is not covered better on Daniels blog.


Hugh

I agree with your suggestion on contributions, I will always try to contribute in my small way, and will be curious to see Daniels future contributions over the next few years, hopefully I will find time to make some good ones over the next few years as well.

Best Justin

[Justin Donaldson]

Also, can we stop always saying "instead of criticising act"? Cause criticising already is acting, but people in front have to be open to changes and willing to act themselves.

I don't think we should stop people from criticizing or stop people from criticizing people who criticize.  Yes, I'm part of the problem in there somewhere.  In my defense, I'm only saying that criticizing is easier than acting.

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> Please note the 4 first items above represent pretty well WWX 2015.
> Unfortunately, the HF Board meeting was... private, right?
>
> Haxe Foundation and SilexLabs, who can host that Bretton Woods of Haxe?
> And when (starting in september I guess)?

As you know already, we had such a meeting at WWX2015, which included
all compiler developers, HF partners, key community people, and a few
invitees (including Alex from Silex). There were like 30 of us, so while
it was not a public meeting with the whole WWX attendees it was already
quite a lot of people to discuss with.

In my own experience it's actually quite hard to get a proper meeting
with more than 10 people where everybody can express his opinion and be
answered. I think we managed to do that at this meeting.

TBH I'm not exactly sure what you're actually aiming at with this
proposal and your suggestions in general.

If it's to bring a message, then I think your WWX talk is already more
than enough. Actually it was maybe already a bit too much since it
offended several people of the community. IMHO I don't think that what
offended people were the actual issues you were pointing at but more
about the form your ideas were conveyed. I've been myself focusing on
the content and not the form so I'm fine with it.

If OTOH it's done to pressure me out in order to accept your vision that
Haxe should be ECMAScript, then I don't think it's going to work.

Like it or not, I have not designed Haxe out of ego for it to become the
"next big thing" (or else I would have done something like CoffeeScript)
but because I wanted to program with such a language. Still Haxe as a
lot of grow potential and I want to help it doing so. And still there's
some room for changes : Haxe has been shaped by users feedback and
important parts of it comes from finding solution to users issues (but
not always the one that was requested).

Still don't expect a complete overhaul of what Haxe is (in terms of a
programming language).

There's actually different visions of what Haxe should be. Some people
in the community would like it to be more
functional/strictly-typed/haskell/scala-like. Some people would like it
to be more dynamically-typed/JS/ECMA-like. I think the reason for it is
that Haxe is at the crossroads of these two otherwise separated worlds.
It has both a strong static typing background while still retaining
several Dynamic features and ECMA-compatible syntax.

It's been designed this way and while in favor of static typing myself I
like to see the simplicity of Haxe as a way to bring more people which
are used to dynamically typed PL to the static camp :) Also, I
personally find very valuable the dynamic aspects of Haxe when doing
things such as reflection.

I'm then planning to maintain a good balance between these two worlds,
which mean avoiding introducing more Dynamic features, which would
actually weaken our cross platform capabilities (because some of the
Dynamic behavior is platform-specific), while still keeping the language
accessible for people with no prior type theory background.

Regarding feature requests and language evolution, I'm currently
tinkering with ways to have a more transparent process regarding
features proposal/discussion/decision. I'll write more on that latter
one I have a more clear idea on what it would like like.

Regarding Haxe Foundation.

We have organizational problems, which I fully acknowledge. The main
reason for it being that we are several people (Simon, Fiene, Jason,
other compiler contributors and myself) from different countries, each
doing that as a part time either hobby or paid work (for the first three
only). While I'm managing a team of 10 at my company by the day, I found
it's a very different thing to manage people remotely.

It works quite well for code. It's harder when it comes to things that
involves collaboration between several people, and for instance PR is
such a thing. Regarding PR BTW, for it to be effective you need some
kind of "actuality" (new version, important announcement, etc.) which we
didn't have since WWX.

Can we improve things : yes, definitely, but it will take time because
it requires finding ways to organize us better, finding more people that
have enough autonomy to work by themselves with little
guidance/management. There's no

Can we do things differently ? That's something I keep thinking, but in
order to change our modus operandi, it would require to establish a full
time team in some office, which requires budget. HF does not yet have
such a budget (more on that below), I have considered several times
investing my own money into it, but it would actually change my
relationship to Haxe and HF, from being something I do for long term to
more short term investment with required ROI (and potential failure). I
would instead prefer that HF reach enough sustainability on its own to
have people working fulltime for it, although that might look like a
chicken-and-egg problem, which it is.

Regarding HF budget, since you asked for it, here is the official
accounting documents - which requires understanding both french and
accounting
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxr4dvgTFeHzSTF5TDhGSFU1M2c/view?usp=sharing.
You will see the two years of activity of HF (nov2012-dec2013 was a
single fiscal year). 2015 is in the same line so far.

Final thoughts : Bretton Woods was organized after the war, at a time
Europe was mostly destroyed. I hope such a thing will not happen again.

Best,
Nicolas

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 00:21, Johann wrote:

> Hi Daniel.
>
> Not long ago you predicted Haxe's eventual death in case it doesn't
> become (more) "ES compatible", and you did so without even trying to
> define your concept of "ES compatibility", except that you'd like to be
> able to copy/paste JS code, which, thankfully, and for obvious reasons
> to anyone familiar with both Haxe's and ES' semantics, is and will only
> ever be possible to a certain extent.

Hello Johann,

I still think Haxe will have a difficult future if it continues to
diverge too much from Web Standards. Can I have such an opinion and
express it without being called names?

> You also present wild speculations about the reasons for the currently
> relatively low adoption of the language, as well as conditions for
> future adoption of Haxe by JS developers, as facts.
> You further proclaim that Haxe had 'been "trying", since inception, to
> be "better" than JS' which is about as accurate as saying that Haskell
> is "trying" to be "better" than PHP;
> You follow up with baseless assumptions about how "Flash compatibilty"
> would be harming Haxe and "maintaining it in a state where it cannot
> reach its full potential".
> Finally, and perhaps most telling, you "100% agreed" to removing
> abstracts from the language.
> And all that without mentioning the terms "types", "type-system", or
> "type-safety" even once.

Yes, I do have an opinion, based on years of market observation and
daily work with all the major players of our software world. So you
call that "wild speculations" and "baseless assumptions", some others
could call it "experience". In all cases, predicting the future IS a
speculation. You think Haxe will spread? I call it a wild speculation
as well. Deuce.

> You're not the first and you certainly won't be the last random person
> stepping into Haxe, who, based on some limited background, is
> - misidentifying the nature of Haxe,
> - missing sufficient exposure to substantial parts of the influences
> that shape[d] its design to even recognize them, let alone to appreciate
> their impact and usefulness,
> - getting fundamental features, properties and policies of the language
> wrong.

Here, you're rather severely underestimating my ability to grasp what's
a new technology and what's it best for.

> Which by itself would be completely fine, since for every newcomer, Haxe
> is unlike anything they've ever seen before. But you're then, based on
> these misconceptions and premature assumptions, demanding that Haxe
> should be limited to the subset of its features, paradigms and
> application domains that your limited imagination suggests, while, of
> course, predicting a bright future if only and only if Haxe followed
> your proposals.

For every newcomer to Haxe, he/she reached it often by pure chance or
interpersonal communication only. Finding Haxe out of the blue is
extremely complicated because Haxe has almost zero visibility.

> Before dumping even more of your "expertise", let alone taking the lead
> in a strategy meeting, it would certainly be wise to acquire a basic
> understanding of the language you're dealing with. The aspects of Haxe

Here, you're insulting me. I never said I want to take a lead and I only
said I want to contribute. I never intended to lead anything. I was
asked to contribute, which I did. My way, certainly. That's why I am
_proposing_ a meeting where I will make _proposals_. Lead? No.

> that you call "too geeky" set Haxe apart, and provide learning
> opportunities for programmers from almost every background. Put to good
> use, they will help create an ecosystem of quality software that the
> ECMAScript world can only dream of. Haxe's competitors are not
> ECMAScript and friends, you rather find them among the likes of Ocaml,
> Haskell, Rust and Scala.

Ocaml, Haskell and Scala will remain perfectly viable programming
environments but under the radars and limited to a minority of projects.
Rust is getting a LOT of traction, because it has a major, hyper visible
project helping it: Servo. But Rust goes far deeper than Haxe, aiming at
providing a replacement for C++ level languages. Haxe cannot offer that.
Will someone ever code a device driver in Rust? Will someone ever code
an Operating System in Rust? Absolutely, it's already the case. Will
someone ever do that in Haxe? Only for a prototype and I'm not even
sure.

</Daniel>

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 01:44, Justin L Mills wrote:

> *Silex*

>
> Could we add Johann's comments in the interest in free speech below
> Daniel's video to clarify the contention with a link to this thread,
> otherwise I feel that the video is misrepresenting Haxe as Johann has
> explained.

Wow. I just can't believe you're asking for such a thing. Wow.

If this is implemented, please provide a link to each unique message in
this thread and not only Johann's.

</Daniel>

[Ian Harrigan]

Daniel, its clearly sarcasm, not a call to arms. I think Nicolases' response has been enlighting and full - maybe replay to that. Are you just trying to be offended? This dialog is a good one, but it has to be adult. "OMG no you just didnt" is probably not a good place for that type of rhetoric. To be clear, i read it as response to you "<freedom of speech />" jibe. I doubt anyone will censor you, here or anywhere in this thread. Would it be ok for me to posit you are being a social justice warrior where it makes no sense?

Maybe a little calm and perspective is needed here. Egos seem to be flailing. My version: haxe doesnt have the visibiliy it should have, that much is for sure. I also feel there is fragmentation amongst the community, but nothing realy, its games and apps makers. I happen to be in the latter, as does Dan, so its tough when you dont have textboxes. But really, its nothing to really get hurt about.

Honestly, i can add my two cents withouth saying that i think nicolas' response is gentlemanly and considerate. I hope we can all continue with this discussion in a similar style.

Cheers,
Ian
 

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 06:55, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:

> As you know already, we had such a meeting at WWX2015, which included
> all compiler developers, HF partners, key community people, and a few
> invitees (including Alex from Silex). There were like 30 of us, so while
> it was not a public meeting with the whole WWX attendees it was already
> quite a lot of people to discuss with.
>
> In my own experience it's actually quite hard to get a proper meeting
> with more than 10 people where everybody can express his opinion and be
> answered. I think we managed to do that at this meeting.

AFAICT, this meeting mostly dealt with the following topics:

- better IDE support
- Haxe call-in
- HF Communication
- technical language/ecosystem details
- release frequency

plus a few extras I'm not aware of and it lasted only a few hours.
Where are the minutes ? Where is the list of decisions? Where can we
read the various opinions expressed? How can we comment? I am calling
this opaque.

> TBH I'm not exactly sure what you're actually aiming at with this
> proposal and your suggestions in general.

Seriously?

> If it's to bring a message, then I think your WWX talk is already more
> than enough. Actually it was maybe already a bit too much since it
> offended several people of the community. IMHO I don't think that what

Yes, I particularly remember Simn's answer to my talk. He was
fulminating and he asked me to provide solutions to the issues I
was raising. As if Bugzilla or Git issues were filed only when the patch
is already available on the tech side. As if any feedback was not
feedback.
On another note, roughly twenty people came to me or sent me private
messages after WWX to thank me for my talk and its contents.

> offended people were the actual issues you were pointing at but more
> about the form your ideas were conveyed. I've been myself focusing on
> the content and not the form so I'm fine with it.
>
> If OTOH it's done to pressure me out in order to accept your vision that
> Haxe should be ECMAScript, then I don't think it's going to work.

Pressure? No. I only have the feeling that opinion just cannot be
discussed at all. Maybe this is an issue you want to/should deal with.

> I'm then planning to maintain a good balance between these two worlds,
> which mean avoiding introducing more Dynamic features, which would
> actually weaken our cross platform capabilities (because some of the
> Dynamic behavior is platform-specific), while still keeping the language
> accessible for people with no prior type theory background.

Thank you. You just said what I was expecting. "You" are planning. Haxe
will reach its tenth anniversary and it's still mostly your decision
where all other OSS languages are maintained/advanced by committee.
I agree that Git allows to propose new stuff, but the general
direction remains in your hands. Brendan Eich is now only a contributor
to TC39 at Ecma; maybe you should consider that move.

> Regarding feature requests and language evolution, I'm currently
> tinkering with ways to have a more transparent process regarding
> features proposal/discussion/decision. I'll write more on that latter
> one I have a more clear idea on what it would like like.

Looking forward to it.

> Regarding Haxe Foundation.
>
> We have organizational problems, which I fully acknowledge. The main
> reason for it being that we are several people (Simon, Fiene, Jason,
> other compiler contributors and myself) from different countries, each
> doing that as a part time either hobby or paid work (for the first three
> only). While I'm managing a team of 10 at my company by the day, I found
> it's a very different thing to manage people remotely.
>
> It works quite well for code. It's harder when it comes to things that
> involves collaboration between several people, and for instance PR is
> such a thing. Regarding PR BTW, for it to be effective you need some
> kind of "actuality" (new version, important announcement, etc.) which we
> didn't have since WWX.

Since WWX, haxe.io has published 7 news reports, including one on WWX
itself. In the same period, the Haxe Foundation has published nothing
visible from the main page of haxe.org. When you reach haxe.org, there
is not even a visible Blog or News section.

The kind of simple action I am proposing: 1. integrate the Haxe Roundup
directly to haxe.org and make Skial become its official editor, with its
name added to the Foundation pages for that. Simple, useful, fast, no
cost. 2. be ready for more editors and news contributors.

In short: integrate WP (or Dotclear or whatever) into the site and give
Skial an account there. If Skial is ok with that, it can done in less
than 24 hours. Oh, and give him the passwd for the HF twitter account
so he can announce new releases.

> Regarding HF budget, since you asked for it, here is the official
> accounting documents - which requires understanding both french and
> accounting
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxr4dvgTFeHzSTF5TDhGSFU1M2c/view?usp=sharing.
> You will see the two years of activity of HF (nov2012-dec2013 was a
> single fiscal year). 2015 is in the same line so far.

Thank you.

> Final thoughts : Bretton Woods was organized after the war, at a time
> Europe was mostly destroyed. I hope such a thing will not happen again.

Bretton Woods was also a meeting of parties with different visions and
requirements, brought to the same discussion table for the best of our
world. Calling a meeting a "Bretton Woods" meeting is extremely common
for strategy/management/organizational meetings without any implication
of destruction or war. You'll find that in many management books.

</Daniel>

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 07:52, Ian Harrigan wrote:

> Honestly, i can add my two cents withouth saying that i think nicolas'
> response is gentlemanly and considerate. I hope we can all continue with
> this discussion in a similar style.

I am trying to contribute my ideas and opinions, and I clearly see this
comes at the expense of my image/reputation in this community. I am
avoiding, as always, all "ad hominem" calls but it's not the case of
others. In short, I'm making baseless speculations leading to silly
ideas and I have no experience nor expertise at all. So yes, I hope
we can discuss Haxe as adults bringing different views and perspectives.
I must say that it's rather desperating to discover it's so difficult.

</Daniel>

[Ian Harrigan]

Dan,

I think you need to grow thicker skin, Nobody here is assaninating your character, or really cares - which ad hominims?. Maybe that one idea of cencorship which im totally against; as i think all people on this list are. I think the issue is your are abrasiveness, thats not an "ad hominem" and maybe you just are like it, and thats ok. Understand however, Dan, that most people dont share your view. I agree with you, i think that haxe needs more visibility, but its for them, rather than for me. I want haxe to be successful because it deserrves to be so. That alone, as an engineer, should have tickled you when you first met it. I doubt anyone of any influence doesnt take you seriously. But calm down, its just not all about you.

Ill attempt to lighten the mood: As my mother woould say when we walked in the the door, "what would you like to eat", we always said soup, we always ate potatoes. We grew up strong. :p

Suffice to say, no one is attacking you personally, they are attacking your method.

[clemos]

Hi again,

Here are the links to Philippe's talk at WWX2015, which was published yesterday :

http://www.silexlabs.org/you-dont-know-flashdevelop/

https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/623162607034347520

Please consider sharing the article itself rather than the YT video alone,

or at least mentionning @silexlabs when tweeting about it ;)

Best,

Clément

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 10:28 AM, clemos <cl3...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi list,

Here are links to the first WWX2015 video, which is Nicolas' talk:

http://www.silexlabs.org/10-years-of-haxe-10-things-i-like/
https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/622440090355281920

Other WWX2015 videos should be published every 2 days.

Enjoy :)

Clément

[Simon Krajewski]

Am 21.07.2015 um 08:12 schrieb Daniel Glazman:
>
>> If it's to bring a message, then I think your WWX talk is already more
>> than enough. Actually it was maybe already a bit too much since it
>> offended several people of the community. IMHO I don't think that what
> Yes, I particularly remember Simn's answer to my talk. He was
> fulminating and he asked me to provide solutions to the issues I
> was raising.

Indeed I was ticked off by your talk. Here's why: We contacted you in
March and wanted to sit down with you at WWX to talk about communication
and other things. You ultimately didn't get back to us and instead took
the stage to deliver what I could only perceive as a hostile rant.

I don't see how you can even pretend noble causes in that context. And
yes, seeing members of the community cheering for what you're doing was
very disheartening.

Simon

[Itzik Arzoni]

Hi,

I can say from my narrow point of view, that what Daniel say about the lack of visibility is really true. The haxe language and libs are amazing, and I really astonished every time I discover another bit that demonstrate how powerful this thing is. But sadly, it is something that is really hidden from the public eye.

More over, I talk to professional programmers and team leaders, and they are very skeptical about Haxe, just because they never heard of it, and no matter how much I show them examples, it is still dismissed with some argument like "Oh, every language have a bunch of enthusiasts that really like their own language". It's only a matter of visibility.
Maybe there can be some action items to extract from this conversation, like what Daniel suggested about the Haxe roundups.

Anyway, If anything, all this thread made me really want to see this talk. :)

Itzik

[Yann Bergonzat]

I think Daniel said what has to be said. I do not think he was "hostile" in any way, at least, I think we wouldn't mean to be. He said things going straight to his point, and I think that was what sounded "rude" to many people. As far as I know, since Haxe exists, we only hear how great it is (and it is), how long we waited to have such a language (and we sure did), but we hardly heard anything "negative" about Haxe. Saying that Haxe is great is... Great, but it doesn't make it better. Telling constructive things about how it could be better can actually do a lot more than just ignoring them.

I think Dan took the "responsibility" to say what's wrong with Haxe, and people are mad at him for that. But what I really respect is that he also tried to provide solutions, he helped, he contributed. He is not just pointing at Haxe yelling "IT'S BAD IT'S BAD", he is pointing at critical problems trying to tell us how to fix them.

Dan may have his own way to tell things, you may find him rude, but you can't say he is disrespectful, or not constructive. That's why, in my opinion, his talk should not be removed from the video (as I have read before).

Now, Dan, please... If someone tells you that you're immature, or you're not experienced enough, or anything else that is obviously not true... Please don't just throw a "Really? Wow.". Keep being constructive. Being sassy doesn't help.

Oh, and I know it doesn't sound obvious in what I wrote above, but I love Haxe, I really do.

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 10:08, Simon Krajewski wrote:

> Indeed I was ticked off by your talk. Here's why: We contacted you in
> March and wanted to sit down with you at WWX to talk about communication
> and other things. You ultimately didn't get back to us and instead took
> the stage to deliver what I could only perceive as a hostile rant.

Right. I was busy fulltime on a contract for a US-based company and I
completely forgot about it. Apologies for that, shit happens from time
to time to everyone including yours truly, unfortunately.
And when Nicolas pinged me right after WWX, first I was sick in
bed and second his email ended up in my spam folder after a reset of
the bayesian filter of thunderbird following a hardware crash. Took me
some time to find it.

> I don't see how you can even pretend noble causes in that context. And
> yes, seeing members of the community cheering for what you're doing was
> very disheartening.

Perception is only perception and it says nothing about the validity of
the arguments made. I would argue that if some people were "cheering"
(to reuse your own prose), it said something about the message itself...

Speaking of "noble" behaviour and hostile rant, your comment during my
talk was violently hostile, up to the point your face was red. I think
I tried both right before and during my talk, several times, to take all
possible precautions to warn "maybe you're not going to like this but
this is not an attack, this is only feedback because I care, and
feedback I think that has to be given". You alone replied I had to
bring solutions on a tone that was purely dismissive. At least, that was
my perception; that perception was a bit altered by the fact I was so
sick but still.

All of that said and closed, please consider the fact I don't change
of opinion overnight and I am indeed contributing potential solutions
now. So can we please go back to the suggestion I made to move the
excellent Haxe Roundup to a new News main section of haxe.org, of
course with Skial's agreement, and discuss it? Thanks.

</Daniel>

[Johann]

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 7:37:07 AM UTC+2, Daniel Glazman wrote:

On 21/07/2015 00:21, Johann wrote:

> Hi Daniel.
>
> Not long ago you predicted Haxe's eventual death in case it doesn't
> become (more) "ES compatible", and you did so without even trying to
> define your concept of "ES compatibility", except that you'd like to be
> able to copy/paste JS code, which, thankfully, and for obvious reasons
> to anyone familiar with both Haxe's and ES' semantics, is and will only
> ever be possible to a certain extent.

Hello Johann,

I still think Haxe will have a difficult future if it continues to
diverge too much from Web Standards. Can I have such an opinion and
express it without being called names?

Where did I call you names? I did not. Except, well, "Daniel". 

 

> You also present wild speculations about the reasons for the currently
> relatively low adoption of the language, as well as conditions for
> future adoption of Haxe by JS developers, as facts.
> You further proclaim that Haxe had 'been "trying", since inception, to
> be "better" than JS' which is about as accurate as saying that Haskell
> is "trying" to be "better" than PHP;
> You follow up with baseless assumptions about how "Flash compatibilty"
> would be harming Haxe and "maintaining it in a state where it cannot
> reach its full potential".
> Finally, and perhaps most telling, you "100% agreed" to removing
> abstracts from the language.
> And all that without mentioning the terms "types", "type-system", or
> "type-safety" even once.

Yes, I do have an opinion, based on years of market observation and
daily work with all the major players of our software world. So you
call that "wild speculations" and "baseless assumptions", some others
could call it "experience". In all cases, predicting the future IS a
speculation. You think Haxe will spread? I call it a wild speculation
as well. Deuce.

I didn't just pick random statements. This is not about opinions. 

1. "baseless assumptions"

To say that "Flash compatibility" prevents Haxe from reaching its full potential clearly demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about what Haxe is and how it works. Haxe allows to compile to AVM2 bytecode, and it allows to use Flash APIs. And on top of that, the community has provided cross-platform implementations of the same API for different platforms.

That's it, there are absolutely no resultant liabilities impeding Haxe's language design in any way. If anything, the outstanding support for Flash APIs and bytecode is an indicator for its versatility, nothing more.

So to get back to the point, yes, it absolutely is a baseless assumption, and your renewed attempt to sell it as resulting from "experience" is nothing short of ridiculous. 

2. "wild speculations"

Yes, it's also called fortune telling, and people engaging in that commonly use crystal balls, and tend to have an agenda. Your fortune telling, in the context of Haxe, entails making up apocalyptic scenarios to "convince" people that Haxe really should be ECMAScript because it would cease to exist otherwise.

You are spreading FUD and there is no place for FUD in productive discussions about the future of Haxe. And that you seem to believe you're dealing with people who fall for such shady (yet obvious) tactics isn't exactly a compliment to the community, either. 

All the while constantly appealing to authority, a fallacy in argumentation that you should probably look up. 

 

> You're not the first and you certainly won't be the last random person
> stepping into Haxe, who, based on some limited background, is
> - misidentifying the nature of Haxe,
> - missing sufficient exposure to substantial parts of the influences
> that shape[d] its design to even recognize them, let alone to appreciate
> their impact and usefulness,
> - getting fundamental features, properties and policies of the language
> wrong.

Here, you're rather severely underestimating my ability to grasp what's
a new technology and what's it best for.

No, I don't have to "estimate" anything, your various posts, comments on issues, as well as your talk, clearly demonstrate your lack of understanding. And that you keep insisting on these (pretty basic) misconceptions over the course of months further illustrates that you don't actually care about what Haxe really _is_. Otherwise you'd have taken the time to verify your premature assumptions to find them disproved on your own. 

To be perfectly clear, anyone who knows Haxe well and cares to read your posts immediately knows how mistaken you are about fundamental properties of the language and certain policies of Haxe's language design. And until you have put in the time to learn, that won't change, no matter how many overconfident statements you make to the contrary. 

> Which by itself would be completely fine, since for every newcomer, Haxe
> is unlike anything they've ever seen before. But you're then, based on
> these misconceptions and premature assumptions, demanding that Haxe
> should be limited to the subset of its features, paradigms and
> application domains that your limited imagination suggests, while, of
> course, predicting a bright future if only and only if Haxe followed
> your proposals.

For every newcomer to Haxe, he/she reached it often by pure chance or
interpersonal communication only. Finding Haxe out of the blue is
extremely complicated because Haxe has almost zero visibility.

You're conveniently changing the topic here, but it's a valid point for a change. It's only partially true, however, and it's not exactly breaking news either. Google cross platform language, cross platform programming language, cross platform toolkit, and see for yourself. 

 

> Before dumping even more of your "expertise", let alone taking the lead
> in a strategy meeting, it would certainly be wise to acquire a basic
> understanding of the language you're dealing with. The aspects of Haxe

Here, you're insulting me. I never said I want to take a lead and I only
said I want to contribute. I never intended to lead anything. I was
asked to contribute, which I did. My way, certainly. That's why I am
_proposing_ a meeting where I will make _proposals_. Lead? No.

Calling for a strategy meeting to present a plan for a global strategy along with a list of rules is enough of taking the lead for my taste, but OK, point taken, you just want to contribute.

 

> that you call "too geeky" set Haxe apart, and provide learning
> opportunities for programmers from almost every background. Put to good
> use, they will help create an ecosystem of quality software that the
> ECMAScript world can only dream of. Haxe's competitors are not
> ECMAScript and friends, you rather find them among the likes of Ocaml,
> Haskell, Rust and Scala.

Ocaml, Haskell and Scala will remain perfectly viable programming
environments but under the radars and limited to a minority of projects.

Another case of fortune telling. And you're missing the point here. Good language design is not about popularity, it's about expressiveness, correctness, maintainability and flexibility. 

 

Rust is getting a LOT of traction, because it has a major, hyper visible
project helping it: Servo. But Rust goes far deeper than Haxe, aiming at
providing a replacement for C++ level languages. Haxe cannot offer that.

This is yet another assumption that only shows how much you're mistaken about the nature of Haxe. As a language it already can, and implementation-wise it will provide several targets for low-level systems programming. Maybe you should consider getting a new crystal ball, this one really serves you badly.

regards,

Johann

[Hudson Ansley]

Thanks for the videos Clemos, much appreciated!

Cheers,

Hudson

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 4:28 AM, clemos <cl3...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi list,

Here are links to the first WWX2015 video, which is Nicolas' talk:

http://www.silexlabs.org/10-years-of-haxe-10-things-i-like/
https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/622440090355281920

Other WWX2015 videos should be published every 2 days.

Enjoy :)

Clément

--

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 16:33, Johann wrote:

> Another case of fortune telling. And you're missing the point here. Good
> language design is not about popularity, it's about expressiveness,
> correctness, maintainability and flexibility.

Software graves are full of excellent software superbly designed that
failed on the market or did not reach critical mass. I'm speaking of
reaching a critical mass here. I'm speaking of trying to make Haxe so
visible the Haxe Foundation does not make 60k€/year from contracting
but rather 600k€ or more to help the ecosystem.

Fortune telling? Haxe is ten years old and almost nobody around me, in
both Web Standards circles and software circles, has ever heard of it.
So you're partly right, that's apparently "not about popularity" :-)

> This is yet another assumption that only shows how much you're mistaken about the nature of Haxe. As a language it already can, and implementation-wise it will provide several targets for low-level systems programming. Maybe you should consider getting a new crystal ball, this one really serves you badly.

One _can_ write a driver in Basic, it does not say a driver written in
Basic has ever been released to the masses, eh. As Itzik said, a
deciding manager will in most cases ask the question "who else uses
it?" when facing a language choice. If the choice is not backed by at
least five or six major industry names, that's usually a no-go because
it's considered too risky. And I don't need a crystal ball to tell you
that: in the case of Haxe, I've already proposed it to customers 3
times, and it was refused 3 times for that reason. Probably stupid but
that's how it goes.

</Daniel>

[Johann]

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+2, Daniel Glazman wrote:

...

</Daniel>

Daniel, 

your deflections with regard to the contents aside, it would have been appropriate to retract your accusations that I called you any names or made argumenta ad hominem, when in fact, I didn't. 

So much for a reasonable debate.

Johann

[Jeff Ward]

Clément - awesome, can't wait to watch the videos.

Nicolas - Thanks for considering both dynamic and static viewpoints. I believe products are best driven by one vision, and I appreciate that ease of adoption is on your radar.

All - take a deep breath and go write some code. ;)

[David Elahee]

1- Beyond hf itself, Nicolas and Simon have expressed a lot of contrition here and are expressing both will to cooperate. I know well enough Nicolas to say that if he wanted to kill the discussion, he would have done it.

2- Haxe is already used in many major companies like Disney, Tivo, nickelodeon, tf1, silex, motion twin, royal cactus ( which are among the top 20 Web tech in France ), prezi, our pals at Massive, gameduell and gamesys, proletariat, Terry Cavanagh etc...and the list goes long...this aggregated added value probably goes way near half a billion dollar. So haxe will not vanish, thank you.

3- press release subjects are under advance in the open as stated by the github issue on the Hf/project management Open Git issues (referenced multiple times by the haxe roundup) .

4- Brendon said he did not want integration(last time hf checked),  so hf will make a blog and a community highlight As Stated By The Git Issue on the Hf git issue. If skial want to revise his position, he will be welcome.

So I hereby affirm that this thread is full of non truths that could be addressed better using the dedicated tools ( namely the Hf project management public issues)

_So can we please slow down the passion ?_

Otherwise I ll start to hijack this thread with stupid jokes about non euclidian entities patterning dark schemes too and will totally start spinning off about how to best cook popcorn with Jason and Hugh using unicorns.

Thanks :D

[Benjamin Dasnois]

Wait! I'm discovering there's at least ONE thing public about the HF!

--

[David Elahee]

You mean the foundation popcorn recipe  ?

Simple, you take some bordeaux wine and roast it with oyster sauce !

[Zjnue Brzavi]

#franco365 #haxe #freedom

[Benjamin Dasnois]

Ah. I hoped it was something more interesting in terms of the foundation. :-/

[Franco Ponticelli]

I did nothing this time, I swear.

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> - better IDE support
> - Haxe call-in
> - HF Communication
> - technical language/ecosystem details
> - release frequency
>
> plus a few extras I'm not aware of and it lasted only a few hours.
> Where are the minutes ? Where is the list of decisions? Where can we
> read the various opinions expressed? How can we comment? I am calling
> this opaque.

We have notes from the meeting but we don't have the "minutes" as you
request them, which I guess is would require a full transcript of the
whole exchanges. Who would spend the hours doing that for you to be happy ?

Call it "opaque" if you want, I'm a bit tired of having to justify our
actions. Next time simply ask to join the meeting and you will be able
to participate. We have nothing to hide and we're hiding nothing.

You're welcome to criticize the lack of communication around Haxe, but I
don't think you have any actual moral right to discuss the way we decide
to run our meetings.

>> TBH I'm not exactly sure what you're actually aiming at with this
>> proposal and your suggestions in general.
>
> Seriously?

Seriously.

>> If it's to bring a message, then I think your WWX talk is already more
>> than enough. Actually it was maybe already a bit too much since it
>> offended several people of the community. IMHO I don't think that what
>
> Yes, I particularly remember Simn's answer to my talk. He was
> fulminating and he asked me to provide solutions to the issues I
> was raising. As if Bugzilla or Git issues were filed only when the patch
> is already available on the tech side. As if any feedback was not
> feedback.

I agree with Simon that the form was provocative, pointing out issues
without actually suggesting solutions. Even github issues reporters are
making the effort to provide a reproducible example. To follow your
analogy, your talk was sounding more like "I get this error message in
my code, fix it !"

>> offended people were the actual issues you were pointing at but more
>> about the form your ideas were conveyed. I've been myself focusing on
>> the content and not the form so I'm fine with it.
>>
>> If OTOH it's done to pressure me out in order to accept your vision that
>> Haxe should be ECMAScript, then I don't think it's going to work.
>
> Pressure? No. I only have the feeling that opinion just cannot be
> discussed at all. Maybe this is an issue you want to/should deal with.

It sounds a bit childish/selfish to say that we are refusing to discuss
your opinion. Believe it or not, I'm taking into account every
suggestion I read/hear about Haxe. That doesn't mean I decide to follow
every of them, or else the language would soon become a big mess.

> Thank you. You just said what I was expecting. "You" are planning. Haxe
> will reach its tenth anniversary and it's still mostly your decision
> where all other OSS languages are maintained/advanced by committee.
> I agree that Git allows to propose new stuff, but the general
> direction remains in your hands. Brendan Eich is now only a contributor
> to TC39 at Ecma; maybe you should consider that move.

Like it or not, but this is how it works here. I believe that design by
committee is a bad idea, especially in the area of programming language
design. Now I'm sure you will disagree with that.

Eventually if Haxe becomes a global worldwide success I will relinquish
the control to a committee in order to maintain for the long term, but
at the current step we are this is just a bad idea.

> Since WWX, haxe.io has published 7 news reports, including one on WWX
> itself. In the same period, the Haxe Foundation has published nothing
> visible from the main page of haxe.org. When you reach haxe.org, there
> is not even a visible Blog or News section.

... hence the reason we have not published anything.

We are working on putting up a blog that allows us to publish content.
haxe.org was not built with this in mind, so we have to make a few
changes, it should be done soon hopefully.

Best,
Nicolas

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 21/07/2015 20:34, Benjamin Dasnois a écrit :
> Wait! I'm discovering there's at least ONE thing public about the HF!

I'm not sure if that comment is meant to be humorous or sarcastic.

In the later case let me say that it's particularly annoying for HF
people to hear such things after all the work we do for the Haxe
community by working on maintaining, documenting and improving the
compiler, while keeping EVERYTHING open source.

It seems sometimes people forget good manners. It would be glad for us
to hear sometimes just some nice "thank you" instead of unfounded critics.

Nicolas

[Benjamin Dasnois]

Nicolas, to clarify things, are you saying you're not publishing anything (as the "official organisation behind Haxe") because somebody else did?

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[Jonas Malaco Filho]

Thanks, guys!

[Itzik Arzoni]

Thank you, Nicolas and all the others that put effort to this project!

[Benjamin Dasnois]

Ok Nicolas let me state it clearly : I've been part of the Haxe community for how long? 10 years? I think I actually was interested in Haxe before you publicly announced it because of some private communication… Now, when did I learn about the HF meeting? On the day it happened, after it happened. Yeah, refuse to call it "opaque" if you want but I do.

Talking about good manners, I came talk to you after Daniel's talk, trying to express my concerns, worries, and remarks and all you did was dismissing these basically saying you don't care about individuals (that's what I understood when you said "the important thing is that there are more people joining the community than people leaving"… well maybe one should wonder why people who were very interested in Haxe did leave).

All I saw from you and a few people in the HF during Daniel's talk was dismissal and contempt, while I saw some people, part of the biggest companies you have there, nodding. Maybe someone should consider that.

You know I'm not one holding my words but I'm also not one saying things lightly. It's about time for this community to start asking the good questions and taking the right actions.

Let me state it clear (and this is my personal opinion right here) : I would NOT recommend to any young developer to get engaged 100% with Haxe right now. This would be a risk to them even though the technology itself is full of great promises, but it's been promises for 10 years.

Haxe has to be treated more like a product now instead of being a tool for DIY. A few companies (and projects) have turned it into products, but Haxe itself still isn't because the HF is not including some interesting projects into the Haxe ecosystem from a branding perspective.

Nicolas you are talking about "maintaining, documenting and improving the compiler". You know I'm not going to "blame" you on the "maintaining and improving" parts. I believe you've been doing a great job as an individual and some other people have too. You pride yourself on keeping it fully open-source and I can understand that but now I'll tell you what : regarding documentation, it is a freaking joke! I still can't find on the Haxe website a list of the environment variable used by Haxe, let alone a list of these for Haxe 2.

Moreover, I basically do not care wether everything is open-source or not. I've fixed a few things in the compiler in the past, probably not as much as some other people (for sure) but I did. That was fine being able to BUT I would prefer you treating Haxe as a real product that companies can rely on and therefor use, which means they're going to hire Haxe developers. When recruiters call me they first thing they asked (oh shit I already said that during the conference) is "Do you do JQuery [or any other modern JS framework]? I see you use Haxe, what's this thing? Ah but then do you do JavaScript?" and if I say no, even if I try explaining, then all I may get is a "bye".

You have to understand, and this is a basic that young "computer scientists" that are trained for managing projects get told in first year is that when you start a project you look at who supports the technology, what's the risk for it not to be maintained anymore, can you eventually pay to get something fixed quickly, and what's the pool of devs (which also allows you to estimate the pool of devs in 10 years when you will have to maintain your solution and their salary).

Now if you just want to dismiss all of that and all other remarks that have been made, say it clearly, say "I'm the king of the Haxe hill along with the few chosen ones" and we'll know we just have to shut up and everyone will be able to act accordingly. I don't think reigning on an empty land is much fun though…

[Raoul Duke]

Thank you!!

[Raoul Duke]

I agree the docs are not all they should be! Zowie! I'm the guy who
tried to get it clarified how equals worked in 2.x and then Nicolas
went and deleted my wiki contribution. Didn't fix it, didn't amend it,
just apparently thought nobody should be allowed to know or record the
knowledge of how equals works in various situations.

but:

> Moreover, I basically do not care wether everything is open-source or not

ooh ooh, I care! :-) Please keep it open source!

[Philippe Elsass]

Alright so we again beat the heroes to death again: Haxe needs visibility, and the action to take is to contribute and nudge the Foundation to work in this direction. I think the good will is here: we wanted better docs, a nice haxelib website, and we have it now. Next focus should be to make Haxe more visible, and hopefully we'll all have lots of great ideas for that.

Aside from that, honestly I think that's fair enough if the Foundation focuses on driving the language. What we need to see (and what the Foundation should facilitate) are businesses leveraging Haxe, the same way Ruby On Rails is leveraging Ruby. Quaxe or OpenFL could be such business: offering a solution, anecdotally based on Haxe, to one very concrete need.

In terms of business, as far as Massive Interactive is concerned, Haxe is far from being the biggest problem to sell our services: it's somehow an implementation detail, with the promise (actually rarely needed because we essentially target JS) of being capable of targeting any platform. Our value is out expertise in targeting the myriad of different TVs, and Haxe enables use to do it professionally and efficiently.

Cheers.

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 21:21, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:

> We have notes from the meeting but we don't have the "minutes" as you
> request them, which I guess is would require a full transcript of the
> whole exchanges. Who would spend the hours doing that for you to be happy ?

I only discover now


https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/Project-Management/wiki/Meeting-Notes---Board-Meeting---31.05.2015

and I'm not sure this was announced. If it was not, it's fixed now.

> Call it "opaque" if you want, I'm a bit tired of having to justify our
> actions. Next time simply ask to join the meeting and you will be able
> to participate. We have nothing to hide and we're hiding nothing.

Did I ever use the word "hide"? No. It's a lack of communication, not a
will to hide things. Let me ask the question again: was the URL above
announced? I cannot find it in this mailing-list.

> You're welcome to criticize the lack of communication around Haxe, but I
> don't think you have any actual moral right to discuss the way we decide
> to run our meetings.

Well, I think I have a moral right, as a corporation betting on this
technology, to know what kind of future you're planning for it and how.
I think other corporations doing the same deserve that too. As of today,
I have not a single clue about what was precisely discussed or decided
during that meeting if you except he headlines (again, I only discovered
minutes ago the URL above and I have to read it).

> I agree with Simon that the form was provocative, pointing out issues
> without actually suggesting solutions. Even github issues reporters are
> making the effort to provide a reproducible example. To follow your
> analogy, your talk was sounding more like "I get this error message in
> my code, fix it !"

This is then a deep, deep difference between us and it will always be.
Mozilla's bugzilla bug count is above 1,185,900 and a VERY large part
of these bug reports come from users who only say "this is broken,
please fix it". And it's totally normal. We don't expect from bug
reporter to know how to hack Gecko and since you can't suppose all
Haxers are fluent in ocaml, you probably don't expect all bug reporters
to be able to fix a core bug. Right?

And about the provocative form, maybe. But it does not change the fact
addressing the form of the message does not address the contents of the
message.
Or maybe not since so many people nodded when I spoke, something you
apparently have a problem with.

> Like it or not, but this is how it works here. I believe that design by
> committee is a bad idea, especially in the area of programming language
> design. Now I'm sure you will disagree with that.

Yes, I do disagree with that, based on 25 years of active membership in
standards committees.

> We are working on putting up a blog that allows us to publish content.
> haxe.org was not built with this in mind, so we have to make a few
> changes, it should be done soon hopefully.

Nice to learn about it now. If you said it before, my fault then, I
missed most of WWX talks because I was sick.
But it does no address my proposal to integrate what's currently BY FAR
the best source of information about how people are using Haxe, the
Haxe Roundup.

</Daniel>

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 21/07/2015 22:32, Daniel Glazman a écrit :
> On 21/07/2015 21:21, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
>
>> We have notes from the meeting but we don't have the "minutes" as you
>> request them, which I guess is would require a full transcript of the
>> whole exchanges. Who would spend the hours doing that for you to be happy ?
>
> I only discover now
>
>
> https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/Project-Management/wiki/Meeting-Notes---Board-Meeting---31.05.2015
>
> and I'm not sure this was announced. If it was not, it's fixed now.

Right, it seems like we didn't announce it, the post WWX has been pretty
busy, we will do better next time. But since you asked for the minutes,
a simple google search would have returned it for you (and again, while
I agree other people might be interested, you're the only one so far
having publicly requested for it).

https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=haxe+wwx+board+meeting

And calling it opaque while you simply didn't actually search if the
information was publicized or not seems a bit overrated.

>> You're welcome to criticize the lack of communication around Haxe, but I
>> don't think you have any actual moral right to discuss the way we decide
>> to run our meetings.
>
> Well, I think I have a moral right, as a corporation betting on this
> technology, to know what kind of future you're planning for it and how.

That's not what you're asking here. You're asking that our way do run
the whole thing should follow your rules. You didn't ask for a roadmap,
you didn't even ask for the minutes. You first criticized things as
being opaque/private, then when I tell you many people where present you
complained about the lack of minutes, and once it's actually available
you said we should have announced them.

Okay. Fair.

But why not asking for them in the gentle manner in the first place ?

For example (in case you don't know how to do)

"Hey guys, there was a HF board meeting at WWX and I would like to know
what was told there, does HF has a document somewhere about it ?
-Thanks
</Daniel>"

And that's it. No drama. No posture.

> Mozilla's bugzilla bug count is above 1,185,900 and a VERY large part
> of these bug reports come from users who only say "this is broken,
> please fix it". And it's totally normal. We don't expect from bug
> reporter to know how to hack Gecko and since you can't suppose all
> Haxers are fluent in ocaml, you probably don't expect all bug reporters
> to be able to fix a core bug. Right?

That's not what I'm saying. Read again.

> And about the provocative form, maybe.

At least we agree on that.

> But it does not change the fact
> addressing the form of the message does not address the contents of the
> message.
> Or maybe not since so many people nodded when I spoke, something you
> apparently have a problem with.

Maybe you could explain me which problem do I have with that, because
I'm not aware I have one... We are taking into account the things you
(and other people) said to us, and planning things accordingly, so yes
we are addressing the content of the message.

>> We are working on putting up a blog that allows us to publish content.
>> haxe.org was not built with this in mind, so we have to make a few
>> changes, it should be done soon hopefully.
>
> Nice to learn about it now. If you said it before, my fault then, I
> missed most of WWX talks because I was sick.
> But it does no address my proposal to integrate what's currently BY FAR
> the best source of information about how people are using Haxe, the
> Haxe Roundup.

David already answered you about this one. We contacted Brandon and so
far he doesn't want his Roundup to become an official thing, which is
sad but there's nothing we can do about it unless he changes his mind.

Best,
Nicolas

[Daniel Glazman]

On 21/07/2015 22:55, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:

> And calling it opaque while you simply didn't actually search if the
> information was publicized or not seems a bit overrated.

Yes, I admit it, I never thought it could be available without being
announced so I never thought google search could give a result...

> But why not asking for them in the gentle manner in the first place ?
>
> For example (in case you don't know how to do)
>
> "Hey guys, there was a HF board meeting at WWX and I would like to know
> what was told there, does HF has a document somewhere about it ?
> -Thanks
> </Daniel>"

Sending a one-liner to this list with "Board meeting notes available at
<URL>" is a matter of *seconds*.

> David already answered you about this one. We contacted Brandon and so
> far he doesn't want his Roundup to become an official thing, which is
> sad but there's nothing we can do about it unless he changes his mind.

Too bad. _Very_ unfortunate.

</Daniel>

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 21/07/2015 21:56, Benjamin Dasnois a écrit :
> Ok Nicolas let me state it clearly : I've been part of the Haxe
> community for how long? 10 years? I think I actually was interested in
> Haxe before you publicly announced it because of some private
> communication… Now, when did I learn about the HF meeting? On the day it
> happened, after it happened. Yeah, refuse to call it "opaque" if you
> want but I do.

We have HF meetings at every WWX. We can't have everybody there because
if we get the whole conference there it can no longer be a discussion
but it will be more like a Q&A, which I'm fine doing too (there was no
such thing at WWX this year), but it will be a different thing.

> Talking about good manners, I came talk to you after Daniel's talk,
> trying to express my concerns, worries, and remarks and all you did was
> dismissing these basically saying you don't care about individuals
> (that's what I understood when you said "the important thing is that
> there are more people joining the community than people leaving"… well
> maybe one should wonder why people who were very interested in Haxe did
> leave).
>
> All I saw from you and a few people in the HF during Daniel's talk was
> dismissal and contempt, while I saw some people, part of the biggest
> companies you have there, nodding. Maybe someone should consider that.

I don't think you've been listening correctly to what I said:

- you came up with a concern regarding yourself about the "investment"
you're doing by learning Haxe, and how it can play against you when some
companies want to recruit you. If I remember correctly, I replied that
in general it's a better thing to learn a niche tech than to be a
generalist, and that if you still felt this way you should maybe do
something else, that it's normal to have people leaving the community
and it's fine as long as more are joining (which was half-joke). I don't
see how that would be bad manners in some way.

- the first thing I said after Daniel's talk was that it was an annoying
talk, in particular because he was right about several things. It
doesn't sound like a dismissal. After that I have talk to Daniel and we
exchanged a few mails afterwards. And read my other answers to him : no
dismissal again.

> You know I'm not one holding my words but I'm also not one saying things
> lightly. It's about time for this community to start asking the good
> questions and taking the right actions.

And what would that actually mean in that context ?

> Haxe has to be treated more like a product now instead of being a tool
> for DIY. A few companies (and projects) have turned it into products,
> but Haxe itself still isn't because the HF is not including some
> interesting projects into the Haxe ecosystem from a branding perspective.

For instance ?

> Nicolas you are talking about "maintaining, documenting and improving
> the compiler". You know I'm not going to "blame" you on the "maintaining
> and improving" parts. I believe you've been doing a great job as an
> individual and some other people have too. You pride yourself on keeping
> it fully open-source and I can understand that but now I'll tell you
> what : regarding documentation, it is a freaking joke! I still can't
> find on the Haxe website a list of the environment variable used by
> Haxe, let alone a list of these for Haxe 2.

Which environment variables are we talking about ? I think there's a
single one in the whole compiler, which is not standard usage. BTW we
are no longer providing documentation for Haxe 2, which is already 3
years old...

> BUT I would prefer you treating Haxe as a real product that
> companies can rely on and therefor use, which means they're going to
> hire Haxe developers. When recruiters call me they first thing they
> asked (oh shit I already said that during the conference) is "Do you do
> JQuery [or any other modern JS framework]? I see you use Haxe, what's
> this thing? Ah but then do you do JavaScript?" and if I say no, even if
> I try explaining, then all I may get is a "bye".

Sorry but I don't see how HF can fix that in the very short term.

Turning a new programming language, a statically typed one, into a
worldwide success, without any backing from one of the big internet
companies, is a hard task. We have things to work on, we need more
communication, more success stories, more of a lot not-technical things.
But don't expect miracles. I never promised there will be such a
miracle, because I'm sure of one thing : it's still a long road ahead.

Best,
Nicolas

[Nicolas Cannasse]

>> "Hey guys, there was a HF board meeting at WWX and I would like to know
>> what was told there, does HF has a document somewhere about it ?
>> -Thanks
>> </Daniel>"
>
> Sending a one-liner to this list with "Board meeting notes available at
> <URL>" is a matter of *seconds*.

Sure it would, we have to make it's done well next time.

>> David already answered you about this one. We contacted Brandon and so
>> far he doesn't want his Roundup to become an official thing, which is
>> sad but there's nothing we can do about it unless he changes his mind.
>
> Too bad. _Very_ unfortunate.

We agree on this.

Nicolas

[Hudson Ansley]

Thank you Nicolas and all the other Haxe contributors. 

And also, thank you to Nicolas for his amazing patients, diplomacy and diligence in giving carefully considered answers to so many (some not so carefully considered) questions and statements. 

Cheers,

Hudson

[Juraj Kirchheim]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 9:56 PM, Benjamin Dasnois <benjamin...@gmail.com> wrote:

regarding documentation, it is a freaking joke! I still can't find on the Haxe website a list of the environment variable used by Haxe, let alone a list of these for Haxe 2.

The "freaking" joke is on you. What you should have done would be to head to exactly that tracker to raise the issue to discover this: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/HaxeManual/issues/43

Also, the Haxe documentation has improved greatly in the past and continues to do so. Therefore, I find your assessment rather questionable. If there is anything that requires particular attention, do open an issue, instead of merely complaining. 

Best,

Juraj

[Benjamin Dasnois]

I'm going to reply inline;

>We have HF meetings at every WWX. We can't have everybody there because if we get the whole conference there >it can no longer be a discussion but it will be more like a Q&A, which I'm fine doing too (there was no such thing at >WWX this year), but it will be a different thing.

How many times has it been announced? How many times did we have some feedback? None. I believe you are wrong on the fact that you can't have a discussion with a lot ; it sure does require more planning, setting topics and goals and may require several subsequent meetings. But I can understand if you find that too cumbersome but at least be clear on when the meeting is happening, who is in, what the goals are and be prepared to give the outcome and then present this outcome and have a Q&A session with everyone : this way people can give you feedback and you may want to reconsider some things. At the moment decisions taken are opaque because they are not announced.

>- you came up with a concern regarding yourself about the "investment" you're doing by learning Haxe, and how it >can play against you when some companies want to recruit you. If I remember correctly, I replied that in general it's a >better thing to learn a niche tech than to be a generalist, and that if you still felt this way you should maybe do >something else, that it's normal to have people leaving the community and it's fine as long as more are joining (which >was half-joke). I don't see how that would be bad manners in some way.

Ok there might be some misunderstanding here ; the issue is not about me, it's about what developers experience on the job market because at the end of the day we all have bills to pay you know. Being an AS/400 litterate is good right now and it's a niche yes, but that's only the case because it wasn't such a niche 25 years ago. If your tech is so niche right now that it's difficult to market, think about what it's going to be in 5 and 10 years!

>- the first thing I said after Daniel's talk was that it was an annoying talk, in particular because he was right about >several things. It doesn't sound like a dismissal. After that I have talk to Daniel and we exchanged a few mails >afterwards. And read my other answers to him : no dismissal again.

Ok you may not realise it but some of your words sound like pure dismissal. It may be a perception thing but I tend to think words have a meaning even when the speaker doesn't realise it. It seems to relate to the previous point and I had actually taken notes during the conference (which I don't have anymore but I'll be happy to have a look again when the video will be available)

>And what would that actually mean in that context ?

That maybe we need to start wondering about points that should have been addressed several years ago given Haxe is 10 years old and stop with the cult of personality that exists (I remember this has been raised about 5 years ago already on this mailing-list!)

>For instance ?
OpenFL, HaxeFlixel, a good library... All these things that, if correctly documented and marketed can finally make Haxe look like a real tool. All these things that should trigger a press release...

> Which environment variables are we talking about ? I think there's a single one in the whole compiler, which is not standard usage. BTW we are no longer providing documentation for Haxe 2, which is already 3 years old...

In fact I believe there are 3 that are used by the "Haxe environment", one is used by Haxe to know where the std lib is, one is used to know where the haxelib libraries are stored and one is used by haxelib to know where haxe is installed.

And oh my god! 3 years old!!! I don't know you but in my (short) life as a developer I have worked on many projects that have been around for more than 3 years. Do you not understand IT projects' life-cycle (and lifespan) that much? I'm sorry but reading such a comment from the "main contributor" of a technology would totally be a big deterrent for people evaluating techs for a project.

>Turning a new programming language, a statically typed one, into a worldwide success, without any backing from >one of the big internet companies, is a hard task. We have things to work on, we need more communication, more >success stories, more of a lot not-technical things. But don't expect miracles. I never promised there will be such a >miracle, because I'm sure of one thing : it's still a long road ahead.

Nobody said it's an easy thing but expecting a few PRs to be sent, one-liners and inviting journalists when you organise your annual conference is not expecting miracles ; it's good project management from a project owner.

[Benjamin Dasnois]

Juraj do you realise this kind of answers actually is part of the problem I'm pointing out? Do you think anyone evaluating the technology for usability is going to dive into all your issue trackers? Also this issue has been opened on 15th July 2014 and still isn't fixed! What message does that send?

--

[Raoul Duke]

> Juraj do you realise this kind of answers actually is part of the problem
> I'm pointing out? Do you think anyone evaluating the technology for
> usability is going to dive into all your issue trackers? Also this issue has
> been opened on 15th July 2014 and still isn't fixed! What message does that
> send?

yeah,

So this comes up with a lot of (under funded open source, if not all)
projects out there that I have tried to use, at least in the worlds of
programming languages (I like 'fringe' languages!) and game engines.

As an end user, I pretty much 100% agree that this *is* part of the problem.

On the other hand, as somebody who has contributed now and then in
small parts to OS projects (usually with a small doc edit or two that
I think would have helped me along the way) but mostly has worked on
closed commercial ones... It is not all that surprising that the gaps
in documentation (a) are no longer noticed by the people working on
the project, so they don't comprehend how it is narrowing their user
acquisition funnel; (b) are not the kinds of things most people would
want to work on.

I kinda think there's just human nature going on. Face it: most people
do not understand user experience.

I do wish that the people in (a) would learn to hear the newbies and
assume they are actually right and that the docs really are confusing
and trouble, and then say in response, "I hear you! And while issue
trackers aren't the best, we do try to make note of things so that we
can hopefully get around to them some day. And we welcome PRs!"
Instead of the things that get said that sound like they Just Don't
Get It.

$0.02

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

As David Elahee mentioned, there’s a lot of passion in this mailing list, and it shows!

I’ve been following Haxe since its inception but I only now started using It. Why? Well, as Benjamin mentioned, the perceivable market value of Haxe as a skill is negligible in the eyes of most startups (it’s starting to change, yes, but proportionally, say, compared to Ruby and or Javascript, you can’t even compare). 

Haxe (still) is a hard sell..

If you’re building your own products, Haxe starts to make more sense. But only if you actually know what it is and why it would make sense in the first place (in place of more mainstream languages). Why would I use it instead of, say, Ruby on Rails? Ruby has a huge eco-system of libraries for pretty much anything, and most of them are very well maintained. That were all questions that I had in mind. My geek side wanted to go into Haxe, my common-sense would say, nop, business calls for something that has better support.

A technology can be the coolest thing in the world, but if it doesn’t make my life (x times) easier, why would I use it and go through the trouble of learning it? Of course, it might be fun to tinker with it, but I have a life to live and things in the real world. 

So, since I wasn’t into game development at the time and needed to build my portfolio and earn money, it was just natural to go with the mainstream (namely Ruby and javascript). It paid of dividends for me, and I made a good career out of it. It allowed me to reach the level of financial freedom I have today. Level of financial freedom that allowed me to pay for my trip and accommodation for WWX2015 comfortably.

That goes to show that I always thought Haxe had a lot of potential, but I only began using it recently in a personal project of mine (with nodejs — thanks clemos and andreas for haxe-js-kit!). Apart from Nicolas with MotionTwin, OpenFL, and eventually a couple of web projects here and there, there was nothing that would really blow my mind web-wise searching the existing mediums. I took the decision and went to Paris because of that.

Did it change my mind? Hell yeah. A lot of brave people (braver than I am) and early adopters are building a lot of amazing stuff with Haxe. I was still a bit disappointed with the web eco-system, but Jason, Juraj and Clement talks were all really inspiring in this regard. It allowed me to see the real value of Haxe as a toolkit and as a language. It allowed me to map that to potential productivity gains down the road.

Unfortunately, a lot of happens under relative obscurity: it’s hard to get news about Haxe! (If it werent’s for Skial…).

Not everyone is willing to do go to that extent (go to the conference) to change their perception about something, though. That’s why I think Daniel’s statements make a lot of sense, even if painful in some ways. And it also goes to show that he actually cares about it.

Now, onto the practical side of things...

I saw a talk by André Arko*[0], the current maintainer of Bundler*[1] last month, and I think it sums up one of the most important aspects of this discussion - not only welcoming contributions by anyone, but making it damn easy to do so:

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/indirect/including-people-magmaconf-2015. 

Unfortunately I don’t have the transcripts nor the video recordings. However, check this out:

https://github.com/bundler/bundler/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

This would be very useful for us. We could maybe adapt it and use it as a starting point. I haven’t found anything about contributing to Haxe, apart from a very small article from the old site. I’m willing to get a template up if you agree this is a good format. It think it is.

Let’s work towards making Haxe an damn easy sell :)

Oh, I’m looking forward to the rest of the WWX2015 videos! Thanks Silex and Clemént for your hard work!

* [0] http://arko.net/

* [1] http://bundler.io/

— Marcelo

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> How many times has it been announced? How many times did we have some
> feedback? None. I believe you are wrong on the fact that you can't have
> a discussion with a lot ; it sure does require more planning, setting
> topics and goals and may require several subsequent meetings. But I can
> understand if you find that too cumbersome but at least be clear on when
> the meeting is happening

I you want to learn the background story, then here it is.

We couldn't make an announcement, even tell the invited people when it
will happen 24hours before it does, because we didn't have a room to
hold the meeting.

We didn't have such room because Silex Labs refused to get us one, even
when we stated they were invited. They even refused to actually tell us
when a time slot would be available to hold the meeting, and the
conference schedule was posted 2 days (!!!) before the conference.

In the end we had to organize this in a restaurant next to the
conference on early Sunday which was not very practical because they
were playing music. So yes we couldn't plan this beforehand because none
of us lives in Paris and Silex was uncooperative the say the least.

It was a hell to setup, that's why we couldn't make an proper announcement.

> Nobody said it's an easy thing but expecting a few PRs to be sent,
> one-liners and inviting journalists when you organise your annual
> conference is not expecting miracles ; it's good project management from
> a project owner.

Silex organize the WWX, not HF. They had a ~12K€ budget for that this
year. Josefiene tried to help them getting some communication going on,
but we can't make a PR in their place.

Nicolas

[Daniel Glazman]

On 22/07/2015 07:45, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:

> We couldn't make an announcement, even tell the invited people when it
> will happen 24hours before it does, because we didn't have a room to
> hold the meeting.
>
> We didn't have such room because Silex Labs refused to get us one, even
> when we stated they were invited. They even refused to actually tell us
> when a time slot would be available to hold the meeting, and the
> conference schedule was posted 2 days (!!!) before the conference.
>
> In the end we had to organize this in a restaurant next to the
> conference on early Sunday which was not very practical because they
> were playing music. So yes we couldn't plan this beforehand because none
> of us lives in Paris and Silex was uncooperative the say the least.
>
> It was a hell to setup, that's why we couldn't make an proper announcement.
>
>> Nobody said it's an easy thing but expecting a few PRs to be sent,
>> one-liners and inviting journalists when you organise your annual
>> conference is not expecting miracles ; it's good project management from
>> a project owner.
>
> Silex organize the WWX, not HF. They had a ~12K€ budget for that this
> year. Josefiene tried to help them getting some communication going on,
> but we can't make a PR in their place.

<humour>
And _I_ am the provocative one? :-D
</humour>


</Daniel>

[Juraj Kirchheim]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 6:42 AM, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa <fullofc...@gmail.com> wrote:

As David Elahee mentioned, there’s a lot of passion in this mailing list, and it shows!

It sure does ;)

 

I’ve been following Haxe since its inception but I only now started using It. Why? Well, as Benjamin mentioned, the perceivable market value of Haxe as a skill is negligible in the eyes of most startups (it’s starting to change, yes, but proportionally, say, compared to Ruby and or Javascript, you can’t even compare). 

Haxe (still) is a hard sell..

To share my own experience: the further my understanding of Haxe grows, the easier it is to sell for me. My advise therefore is to stop to wait for Haxe to conquer the world and just sit down and use it.

If you’re building your own products, Haxe starts to make more sense. But only if you actually know what it is and why it would make sense in the first place (in place of more mainstream languages). Why would I use it instead of, say, Ruby on Rails? Ruby has a huge eco-system of libraries for pretty much anything, and most of them are very well maintained. That were all questions that I had in mind.

Python, Java, C# and JavaScript have a huge eco-system of libraries that you can leverage with Haxe with increasingly less friction.

 

My geek side wanted to go into Haxe, my common-sense would say, nop, business calls for something that has better support.

I invoke the FlashPlayer counter argument. Or Flex. Or XUL. Or COBOL. Or all the other supposedly everlasting things that either vanished or are at the very least stagnating into oblivion, despite common sense allegedly having suggesting otherwise.

First, some figures to always keep in mind: Haxe is 90KLOC Haxe code (the std lib) and 60KLOC Ocaml (the compiler). The day a plane crashes into a compiler team meeting and kills everyone, I feel confident that I as an individual (and many others for that matter) can pick up OCaml to make the changes I need to make within a reasonable time frame. That being said, having invested a lot of time in macros I should be able to put that off for a year or two ;)

I don't know if you recall Todd's comment during the WWX, but he did say something quite similar that I will attempt to paraphrase like so: Haxe is free and it is small enough for companies such as TiVo to throw resources at to fix problems (and I would amend that is even true for much smaller companies). More often than not, that is simply impossible with businessy solutions. When Adobe failed to take any of the steps necessary to maintain the FlashPlayer's dominant market position, a lot of people were screwed pretty bad.

This resonated very strongly with me, because I was once extremely invested in AS3. When I chose to leave it for Haxe, I was the top answerer for the actionscript-3 tag on stackoverflow. I'm not saying that to brag, but that to make clear that I'm not saying "extremely invested" all too lightly. There was a lot I chose to leave behind, which for me was harder than the leap of faith ahead to Haxe. 

Although I would like to think that I did it for some geeky or noble reasons, it is also true that I chose Haxe because it is a much safer bet than technologies that are either proprietary or in the firm grasp of a huge company that puts its own business first (understandably). When Adobe made the wrong calls, my team at the time was entirely powerless. 

And while the people behind the compiler are doing an awesome job and I see no actual risk of that to stop, let me reiterate one last time that there is something to be said for the actual freedom to take over or fork. It is less a matter of the license, than a matter of handling 60KLOC of OCaml code being in the realm of the possible for a small team or even a single person. You will find that in most other languages there is easily an order of magnitude more stuff to deal with. And it's often good old C code, which does not exactly make it easier. 

To drive that point home: if necessary, Haxe makes taking total control of the language you use an affordable endeavor. Scala is arguably still in the ballpark. Lisp is designed to be like that. So of course it's not a unique advantage, but I'd say among the languages Haxe is often compared with, it is a pretty rare one, that puts its users in an unusually strong position to make guarantees about long term support.

As a side note: It is important to understand that Haxe's small size is to some measure a result of Nicolas' defensive policy towards adding features. As upsetting as it may be at times, it has measurable advantages.

There is another factor contributing to Haxe's future proof, that most language's pass up. It denies competition or otherwise delivering itself to the mercy of market trends. If there is another ecosystem worth expanding into, then we will expand into it eventually. In the meantime, the small, highly portable ecosystem of our own will continue to grow steadily and be with us always, as worthwhile targets come and go. 

A technology can be the coolest thing in the world, but if it doesn’t make my life (x times) easier, why would I use it and go through the trouble of learning it? Of course, it might be fun to tinker with it, but I have a life to live and things in the real world. 

Here's the thing: it does make your life x times easier. Unfortynately, I doubt anything but first hand experience can convey that though, so I'm sorry for being useless here.

Other programming languages are marketed extremely aggressively, praising them as the ultimate solution that will make all your problems go away without any effort on your part. Maybe our issue is that Haxers don't put much value on either consuming or producing hot air, but rather having a language that delivers surprisingly well on the promises that others make and fail to meet.

This is my personal observation: there's quite a number of languages that cater very effectively to the masses by taking shortcuts for the sake of popularity. While choosing them you can probably save yourself some ramp-up time or relish at the new addition to your code golf bag, your code base will be harder to deal with later down the road. In other words, by your mere language choice you are taking on technical debt. Technical debt is of course a necessary evil, but I maintain that it's pretty unhealthy to place it at the very basis of one's toolchain.

This is undoubtedly somewhat contrary to common belief. But many people believing one thing does not make it true. What should be apparent though is that many big software centric companies are not afraid to develop their own languages, despite the fact that it would seem to cut off their supply of people they can hire and put right on the job. One reason of course is NIH that gets pretty excessive in big places - although the reasons for that are not all wrong to be fair. But in the end, it is a long term strategy, to establish a code base in a robust language and to hire people talented enough to pick that language up. They are a better catch then what you can hope to get by fishing in the vast sea of google'n'pasters waiting to be hired. There is a place for them also, just not so much in businesses, where the code base is a mission critical part of the business.

In the end this subject is highly debatable of course. If nothing else, that is my point in fact. Saying that the value of a programming language depends strongly on how many people are able to use it is a gross oversimplification. It is no doubt true for many companies, but I question the desirability of a job where you being replaceable is among the most important requirements. 

More than that, as a programmer I consider it my duty to demand the liberty to use the best tools available to me, in order to be able to deliver the best possible result. It is a form of upward management if you will. For me, haxe/js + tink is a crucially part of the best toolset I can wield. It's not like Haxe is matchless, but I will say that I'm having trouble finding a decent alternative among the more mainstreamish choices.

So, since I wasn’t into game development at the time and needed to build my portfolio and earn money, it was just natural to go with the mainstream (namely Ruby and javascript). It paid of dividends for me, and I made a good career out of it. It allowed me to reach the level of financial freedom I have today. Level of financial freedom that allowed me to pay for my trip and accommodation for WWX2015 comfortably.

Good to hear! I wish you that when you choose to transition to Haxe for your professional work, it will turn out just as well!

 

That goes to show that I always thought Haxe had a lot of potential, but I only began using it recently in a personal project of mine (with nodejs — thanks clemos and andreas for haxe-js-kit!). Apart from Nicolas with MotionTwin, OpenFL, and eventually a couple of web projects here and there, there was nothing that would really blow my mind web-wise searching the existing mediums. I took the decision and went to Paris because of that.

Did it change my mind? Hell yeah. A lot of brave people (braver than I am) and early adopters are building a lot of amazing stuff with Haxe. I was still a bit disappointed with the web eco-system, but Jason, Juraj and Clement talks were all really inspiring in this regard. It allowed me to see the real value of Haxe as a toolkit and as a language. It allowed me to map that to potential productivity gains down the road.

Excellent. Although I really think what matters down the line is persistence, rather than bravery. It's a cheesy thing to say, but here I go: with enough persistence, you can make almost any decision right. This is particularly true for programming, that is subject to far less constraints then other engineering fields.

Unfortunately, a lot of happens under relative obscurity: it’s hard to get news about Haxe! (If it werent’s for Skial…).

Oh yes, how right you are about that. But we either need 10 more Skials, or 1000 more ordinary people to spread the word. With your help, it will only be 999 left - or 900 if we're lucky ;)

Not everyone is willing to do go to that extent (go to the conference) to change their perception about something, though. That’s why I think Daniel’s statements make a lot of sense, even if painful in some ways. And it also goes to show that he actually cares about it.

In my opinion, Daniel's way to deliver his points was unacceptable. Ultimately, if his intention was to get them across, then he failed as a speaker. When confronted about that, he just shifts the blame back to others. I find that difficult to stomach, let alone to work with. I think it's pretty safe to say that this is ultimately the single source of the resistance he is meeting. In all honesty, each and every single one of the issues he had brought up is being discussed for years already. 

Now, onto the practical side of things...

I saw a talk by André Arko*[0], the current maintainer of Bundler*[1] last month, and I think it sums up one of the most important aspects of this discussion - not only welcoming contributions by anyone, but making it damn easy to do so:

The slides: https://speakerdeck.com/indirect/including-people-magmaconf-2015.

Some nice thoughts, absolutely.

Unfortunately I don’t have the transcripts nor the video recordings. However, check this out:

https://github.com/bundler/bundler/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

This would be very useful for us. We could maybe adapt it and use it as a starting point. I haven’t found anything about contributing to Haxe, apart from a very small article from the old site. I’m willing to get a template up if you agree this is a good format. It think it is.

There is this document: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/blob/development/CONTRIBUTING.md

I would say that it has quite a different scope though.

If you think there's anything you can do to make contributing to Haxe easier, please do go ahead. The only thing that makes contributing hard is that some of the issues we face are hard to solve. But there's a multitude of small things that just wait for someone to be picked up and dealt with. While there is no guarantee that a contribution won't be rejected, with the stage we're at, it is a very rare exception.

Let’s work towards making Haxe an damn easy sell :)

Yes, please!

Until we succeed though, here is my advice to everyone willing to listen: You can wait for the circumstances to change. You can even try to be part of that change and I am sure it will come about eventually. But as I said towards the very beginning, you get far better leverage when tackling the problem at a more manageable scale. That is by working to change one of the things you have quite a lot of control over: change yourself. It will positively affect you almost immediately and will make it easy for you to sell Haxe. Get out of the "before I can use Haxe, <put condition here>"-mindset as it only holds you back. Empower yourself. Learn the language as best you can, seek to push it to its boundaries and start getting involved.

Doing so myself did not only open my eyes, but many doors. It is an exciting journey. One that is well worth taking. I have had the chance to get to know extraordinary people. To learn things way beyond my imagination. To work on all kinds of exciting projects. And the best part is, the longer I'm going down this road, the more things I see coming up on the horizon.

There are many things about Haxe that can and should be improved. About the language, about the eco-system, about it's marketing, about it's governance and what not. But all in good time. Haxe is good to go, so go with it. It will definitely deeply affect your perception of the issues at hand, so obsessing now about something that will look very differently down the road is a perfect recipe for time that you will regret having wasted in the first place. At least that's my experience anyway ...

I guess that is all I have to say to those hesitant to really get on board. I hope it helps :)

Best,

Juraj

[Raoul Duke]

> To share my own experience: the further my understanding of Haxe grows, the
> easier it is to sell for me. My advise therefore is to stop to wait for Haxe
> to conquer the world and just sit down and use it.

word.

(Except for how then one hits the frustrating stuff, and we come full
circle. ;-)

[Daniel Glazman]

On 22/07/2015 20:45, Juraj Kirchheim wrote:

> To share my own experience: the further my understanding of Haxe grows,
> the easier it is to sell for me. My advise therefore is to stop to wait
> for Haxe to conquer the world and just sit down and use it.

Excuse me Juraj, and please don't take it bad, but that made me laugh a
lot. The three companies that refused me to use Haxe to write their
code all used the same argument « it's not because you love it and
recommend it we're going to use something so unpredictable ».

> I invoke the FlashPlayer counter argument. Or Flex. Or XUL. Or COBOL. Or

XUL? I know a little bit about that:-) You mean a technology based on
Web standards (XML, CSS and ahem EcmaScript) released to hundreds of
millions?-)

More seriously, the day Haxe reaches the spread of XUL or Flex or Cobol,
we'll all open bottles of champagne. So even if they're (very) slowly
dying, they did reach before the critical mass to be adopted by
zillions, litterally.

That said, XUL is still living in all instances of Firefox Thunderbird
and BlueGriffon on desktops, Flex is still used by thousands of
companies, and like it or not, Cobol is so not going away that Cobol
experts are better paid than Web experts and find job offers in a
matter of minutes. Cobol is alive and doing well, it just does not
address our kind of projects. I'd love to see Haxe reach such a
"stagnating into oblivion".

> More than that, as a programmer I consider it my duty to demand the
> liberty to use the best tools available to me, in order to be able to
> deliver the best possible result. It is a form of upward management if

That's _absolutely_ not how my customers work. I haven't seen a single
customer of my company in 12 years letting me do that. In the end, it's
a choice between making a revenue stream, or not.
Oh, yeah, you're in theory right, I should be able to use only what I
like, master and recommend. But it's customers' freedom of choice to
say no and flee. It's a balance between my will and their requirements
and orders.

> In my opinion, Daniel's way to deliver his points was unacceptable.
> Ultimately, if his intention was to get them across, then he failed as a
> speaker. When confronted about that, he just shifts the blame back to

I accept that feedback. Apparently, some people have expressed here
their disagreement with that opinion, showing I did not "fail as
a speaker" that much. But I am not important here, only the conveyed
message is.

> others. I find that difficult to stomach, let alone to work with. I
> think it's pretty safe to say that this is ultimately the single source
> of the resistance he is meeting. In all honesty, each and every single

Sorry, I just laughed again :-)

> one of the issues he had brought up is being discussed for years already.

Years? Really?!? Then tell me why they're not addressed yet a way or
another and still need to be brought here? Is really the lack of
communication around Haxe a years old issue?

> Until we succeed though, here is my advice to everyone willing to
> listen: You can wait for the circumstances to change. You can even try
> to be part of that change and I am sure it will come about eventually.
> But as I said towards the very beginning, you get far better leverage
> when tackling the problem at a more manageable scale. That is by working
> to change one of the things you have quite a lot of control over: change
> yourself. It will positively affect you almost immediately and will make
> it easy for you to sell Haxe. Get out of the "before I can use Haxe,
> <put condition here>"-mindset as it only holds you back. Empower
> yourself. Learn the language as best you can, seek to push it to its
> boundaries and start getting involved.

Right, as if anyone had time, skills and capacity to dive into a
pretty complex ocaml code. As far as I am concerned, and to repeat what
I said above, contracting companies cannot afford that investment.
The technology is either easy, famous and easily
"sellable" to customers or not. There's nothing in between. Contracting
companies cannot afford to invest 6 months engineer time to let a core
team "master" a new tech because the customer will not pay for that. So
the tech is mainstream OR (exclusive or) not. In the latter case, it's
often too expensive and too risky to dive into it.
FWIW, that's how the market has been living and acting for my
company (and others around me) for the last 12 years.

</Daniel>

[Daniel Glazman]

On 22/07/2015 20:45, Juraj Kirchheim wrote:

> gross oversimplification. It is no doubt true for many companies, but I
> question the desirability of a job where you being replaceable is among
> the most important requirements.

I forgot to comment on that, sorry. In normal times, a company will
hardly bet on a tech where people are not replaceable. A technology
reaches momentum when there is a large pool of hires or they're
struggling with the one and only major issue tech companies are facing:
hiring. It's again a question of affording or not to train people
six months before they become operational.

Go to http://slashdot.org/job_board.pl and look for Haxe job offers.

</Daniel>

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Le 23/07/2015 08:42, Daniel Glazman a écrit :
> On 22/07/2015 20:45, Juraj Kirchheim wrote:
>
>> gross oversimplification. It is no doubt true for many companies, but I
>> question the desirability of a job where you being replaceable is among
>> the most important requirements.
>
> I forgot to comment on that, sorry. In normal times, a company will
> hardly bet on a tech where people are not replaceable. A technology
> reaches momentum when there is a large pool of hires or they're
> struggling with the one and only major issue tech companies are facing:
> hiring. It's again a question of affording or not to train people
> six months before they become operational.

IMHO jobs is a chicken-and-egg problem. As soon has Haxe will gain some
traction, jobs offers/demands will rise as well.

Best,
Nicolas

[Adrian Veith]

Am 23.07.2015 um 07:56 schrieb Daniel Glazman:
> On 22/07/2015 20:45, Juraj Kirchheim wrote:
>
>> More than that, as a programmer I consider it my duty to demand the
>> liberty to use the best tools available to me, in order to be able to
>> deliver the best possible result. It is a form of upward management if
> That's _absolutely_ not how my customers work. I haven't seen a single
> customer of my company in 12 years letting me do that. In the end, it's
> a choice between making a revenue stream, or not.
> Oh, yeah, you're in theory right, I should be able to use only what I
> like, master and recommend. But it's customers' freedom of choice to
> say no and flee. It's a balance between my will and their requirements
> and orders.

Its a matter of trust. If your customers trust your competence, than
they follow your technological decisions. But if you yourself don't
trust the tools you are using, you can't convey your decisions. I use
Haxe for nine years now and never had any discussion about that.

>> In my opinion, Daniel's way to deliver his points was unacceptable.
>> Ultimately, if his intention was to get them across, then he failed as a
>> speaker. When confronted about that, he just shifts the blame back to

I was at WWX only on Saturday, so I missed this talk (and others, which
is more bad). I would like to see the video of this talk to make my own
opinion. The Haxe community is strong enough to cope with that. If his
talk was so unacceptable, then sooner or later he will realize and wish
the video away.

> Right, as if anyone had time, skills and capacity to dive into a
> pretty complex ocaml code. As far as I am concerned, and to repeat
> what I said above, contracting companies cannot afford that
> investment. The technology is either easy, famous and easily
> "sellable" to customers or not. There's nothing in between.
> Contracting companies cannot afford to invest 6 months engineer time
> to let a core team "master" a new tech because the customer will not
> pay for that. So the tech is mainstream OR (exclusive or) not. In the
> latter case, it's often too expensive and too risky to dive into it.
> FWIW, that's how the market has been living and acting for my company
> (and others around me) for the last 12 years. </Daniel>

Haxe is one of the easier languages around. Even beginners can start
very easily. A skilled programmer should get productive in 1 or 2 weeks.
Diving into the compiler is another story - but who needs that - and if,
diving into any compiler is difficult and time consuming. I can't see no
point here - even if I sometimes wish, that Haxe was written in Haxe,
but this my laziness to learn OCAML.

My biggest fear is, that my competitors start using Haxe ;-)

cheers Adrian.

[Daniel Glazman]

On 23/07/2015 09:24, Adrian Veith wrote:

> point here - even if I sometimes wish, that Haxe was written in Haxe,

100% agreed.

</Daniel>

[Philippe Elsass]

I'd like to second that Haxe is easy to get into: good productivity with the language will come in a matter of weeks. At least when practices and tools are in place.

It's not always easy however to recruit though - we're starting a hiring spree (Prague and possibly London, no remote) to honour the big Haxe projects we sold, and we'll have to train non-Haxe developers. But that's OK for me.

PS: no as a developer you don't just use the language and tools you want; you need to reach a consensus with your managers and colleagues. And for that it would help to have detailed "Haxe case studies" (for the platform you want to target) that can help support your proposition.

Philippe

[Adrian Veith]

lazy people like us, don't always get what they want.

[der Raab]

„Wow“ - took me almost 1,5 hours to read and understand everything - especially the off topic part. :D So first on topic: Thank’s for the videos! Already three public - looking forward to all of them. Especially the one provoking such an passionate discussion!

As a matter of fact Daniels talk, the discussion that came up during WWX and this thread here reassured that we as a company invest and settle on the right platform. The responsibility towards our families and employees made it necessary to consider more than just an technology but an ecosystem. And if topics like Haxe popularity and therefore improving on documentation, communication and usability can be discussed - it is a good thing!

To us it’s very important that everybody who’s working hard getting started with Haxe, will benefit from it in the future. Despite all the terrific cross platform possibilities - the main fact for betting on Haxe was seeing companies like Tivo and Prezi (and maybe even bigger ones) are actually using this platform as well. And therefore enthusiasts here at our company might be interested in diving into it, and later still be able get a job somewhere else too.

My point of view on the current topic: Nicolas did and does a great job in making design decisions and I love the fact that Haxe itself is not that huge (good point back2dos), which seems to be necessary to add new targets in the future. And the open source community and all the different people and projects are just amazing! But i’m also happy that someone with more of an business focus tried to use his experience to monetize the technology itself and made his point of view quite clear.

So what makes me confident in Haxes future is, that open source enthusiasts and business will discuss this and then agree on something that’s will contain the necessities of both worlds.

Everybody in this group loves Haxe - although not everybody has the same reasons. That’s ok - isn’t it?

[Yann Bergonzat]

I really like that.

[Srulo Art]

Thanks for all the good work everybody are doing on and with Haxe so fools like me can actually use one simple code base to target ludicrously high number of platforms for free.

I think the ultimate power of Haxe comes from the talented individuals that supports it, so they ought to be supported themselves. 

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 11:28:24 AM UTC+3, clemos wrote:

Hi list,

Here are links to the first WWX2015 video, which is Nicolas' talk:

http://www.silexlabs.org/10-years-of-haxe-10-things-i-like/
https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/622440090355281920

Other WWX2015 videos should be published every 2 days.

Enjoy :)

Clément

[Domagoj Štrekelj]

Hello!

First off, I'd like to thank Silex Labs for all the work put into WWX 

and everything that comes with it. The videos from WWX talks are, to 

me, a great and invaluable resource for learning the Haxe language and 

its capabilities. I appreciate them being made available online so soon :)

Anyway, I wanted to reply sooner, but Google Groups was acting up. I'd like 

to contribute on the subject of visibility. I've been using Haxe for around 

two years now, so I guess I'm still "green" enough to shed some light on the 

issue.

I found out about Haxe by "word of mouth", in a sense, while researching

for my bachelor's thesis - the topic of which was cross-platform computer 

game development. There was a single mention of the language buried within 

some old forum thread, and I believe it was brought up in the context of 

migrating away from Flash.

Haxe quickly captured my imagination and, since then, it has become my 

language of choice. I have had the opportunity to spread the word about it 

at a conference and a couple of presentations.

But, I haven't met a person so far that has even heard of the language. And 

by "person" I mean someone who I believe to be at least somewhat informed.

For example, I know some employees of a company that develops large-scale 

network applications for financial and public sectors. These are mostly done 

in JavaEE, from what I understand, and there are times when the company is 

also contracted to develop mobile and desktop applications to interact with 

the aforementioned network app. I asked them if they ever evaluated Haxe as 

a possible tool for the job, but they weren't at all aware of Haxe's existence.

Haxe seems to be flying under everyone's radar. Well, game developers may be 

the only exception.

To a complete stranger who is looking at Haxe and the use-cases listed on the 

website, there doesn't seem to be that much going on outside of cross-platform 

game development. There's claims for this and that, but little to back them up.

I really can't fault anyone with interests outside of game development who 

doesn't want to become an "early adopter".

In my opinion, Haxe is "invisible" because of a lack of projects vocal about 

their leveraging of the language's features for their particular use-case. The 

weekly round-ups are great for that reason - they are a small showcase of 

Haxe's capabilities. The "Who Uses Haxe" section of the site is also a step in 

the right direction, but the portfolios and showcases are, again, mostly filled 

with a single use-case.

Fortunately, this is something that can be addressed by anyone through 

continued use of Haxe :) Hopefully the projects I work on now and in the 

future will help out those who are just beginning to learn the language.

These are just my thoughts on the matter. I realise I'm mostly rehashing what 

has already been said, but adding another voice to that crowd won't hurt.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

Domagoj

[clemos]

Hi list,

Here are the two latest WWX videos:

Juraj's
http://www.silexlabs.org/haxe-for-the-web-getting-things-done/
https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/625575209177886720

Elliott's
http://www.silexlabs.org/prospects-for-using-go-libraries-in-haxe/
https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/624513707209441281

Enjoy :)

Clément

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 9:55 AM, clemos <cl3...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi again,

Here are the links to Philippe's talk at WWX2015, which was published yesterday :

http://www.silexlabs.org/you-dont-know-flashdevelop/

https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/623162607034347520

Please consider sharing the article itself rather than the YT video alone,

or at least mentionning @silexlabs when tweeting about it ;)

Best,

Clément

[Alex Hoyau]

Hi everyone !

It looks like these ones have not been announced here yet:

• GameDuell's "Cross-Platform Game Development"
  http://www.silexlabs.org/cross-platform-game-development-with-the-gameduell-duelltool/
  With the corresponding tweet: https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/623893433883734016
  
  
• Jason O'Neil's "Isomorphic Haxe"
  http://www.silexlabs.org/isomorphic-haxe-using-ufront-to-build-apps-that-work-client-side-or-server-side/
  With the corresponding tweet: https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/626534237601140736
  
  
• Todd Kulick's talk about Activity
  http://www.silexlabs.org/tivo-activity-haxelib
  With the corresponding tweet: https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/627180081786417152
  
  
• Nickolay Grebenshikov's "Jive the renovation of AsWing"
  http://www.silexlabs.org/jive-the-renovation-of-aswing/
  With the corresponding tweet: https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/628220000088760320
  

And I take this opportunity to congratulate the speakers. This year's talks are of a high quality, well done!

[Jean-Baptiste Richardet]

Hello haxers!

Here a new batch of new passionated speeches:

• Robert Konrad "KHA"
  https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/628939367248035840
  
  
• Srikanth Ganapavarapu "Ide Choice at Tivo"
  https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/629667306461790208
  
  
• David Elahee"Drakarnage: "Slapping data from web servers right in your GPU"
  https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/630374228320219136
  
  
• Lars Doucet "Lime/OpenFL for home game consoles"
  https://twitter.com/silexlabs/status/631085578025615360

Don't forget that every retweet/share save kittens and help cure cancer ;)

Jean-Baptiste