Yeah, my first impression was "This is exactly like Haxe". They definitely went through some steps to make it familiar.

I don't know it for a fact, but this seems a response to Steve Yegge's catchy "Kotlin is better" (also on HN first page now).

>Kotlin came across as strangely familiar, though, and eventually I realized it's because it looks like Swift -- which I was slow to notice because my iOS app is in Objective C for irritating legacy reasons. And of course now I know that's backwards: Kotlin predates Swift by several years, so it's more accurate to say that Swift is like Kotlin.

-Yegge

In fact, it's linked from the Yegge post.

OP here - Yes I posted the link after finding it in Yegge's post. I thought it was interesting to see examples of the two languages side by side.