I've met and spoken with some of the "instant successes" in Flash gaming. DTD, Filler, etc. From the little bit of discussion I had, I got the impression that they didn't really have any profound understanding of how or why the game they made became hugely popular. Mostly, they were benefiting from right-place-right-time effects, from being relative outsiders to gaming, and from having just enough skills to do the job.
Basically, trying to crank out games quickly isn't really a recipe for success. It is a good starting place for creative ideas, though. You can start a project with one thing in mind, build it up to a certain stage, leave it a while to think about, and later come back and iterate on the whole concept.
But if you are looking for reliable success in games, the time spent is way more important.
Type systems have been getting better - more nuanced, more accurate/helpful static checking, though the mainstream is proving very, very slow to go away from the C model.
Have you used haXe in a production environment or enough to see if it works as it promises, truth verses wishes, and warts? Does it deliver on the promise to seamlessly compile to different target languages? It looks promising.
I'm going to speak in terms of techniques rather than tools. These are the best/fastest techniques I've found:
1. Procedural generation in your own code. People forget about this option because classical 2D games were too processing/memory-constrained to allow for anything but tiles loaded direct from ROM, but it's really great for environments. It works out to be very fast to produce because you can iterate and randomize and come up with a lot of variations without extra work, but you have to know what you're going for first. The download size savings is a bonus too.
2. Characters are cheapest to do with 3D only because of animation time. If you don't have a lot of anims, hand-drawn tends to give a more lively result, especially in low-res pixel art styles, but even then, painting over 3D will reduce your error rate. Invest in a Wacom if you want to get serious about drawing on computers, but start with the smallest size: you rarely need more.
3. When I need a clean cartoony look I drag out Inkscape and do a vector trace over the image I'm working with. This can take quite a while, but the results are really good when you go all-out and use two vectors per outline to give them variable width.
The default state of the world is free. Non-free happened because people decided that controlling content distribution for profit was a good idea, several hundred years ago. What if it isn't, or isn't anymore?
I can provide an example of how non-free would hurt you. If every site HN linked to was a pay-site then HN itself, Digg, Reddit, all those sites would suddenly cease to exist. All the fluidity of trading links back and forth would be gone as nobody would be able to afford to investigate what content is good anymore.
In fact, even Google would be in trouble if everything were a pay site. How could they possibly afford to pay to crawl every site on the internet? And, for that matter, what about all those startups that are based around data-mining existing web content?
The argument goes, "We can afford to produce better content by putting it behind a pay-wall." But when taken to the extreme, it's inefficient. No content is so good that it can replace the service of Google and other search engines. Or worse, in the ultra-non-free-world, Google would go from being a de-facto monopoly to a regulated monopoly; they strike up a pay-to-play deal for a site to even EXIST on their search engine and the entire Web is at their mercy. (we're not even talking about placement here)
It sounds ridiculous, but it's exactly the kind of thing we've let happen to copyright and patents in the past. By entering into these complex arrangements of enclosure, you end up with a battle between governments and big business that squashes the rights of individuals beneath regulation and fees.
prisoners dilemma. in your scenario it suddenly becomes ungodly profitable to be the one free act in town selling ad space. real life is somewhere in between the two extremes.
over time prices will come to reflect popularity if not quality.
He starts from the thesis(previously established) that money earning interest is the source of our massive wealth inequality problem - interest ultimately favors a concentration of wealth on one person, and it also favors destructive practices that make a large sum of money immediately and earn interest exceeding the value of a sustainable solution.
From there he points to multiple alternatives that might bring us towards an equal economy without top-down planning.
The one that always bugged me but seems to be true for most dynamic languages is immutable types being passed by value and everything else passed by reference.
Speed? Not sure if this is actually what the OP was thinking of, but pass-by-value usually implies copying, while pass by reference just involves handing around a pointer.
ie, if you had an enormous immutable value (in Python, a tuple with lots of entries), then in a hypothetical Python implementation which did call-by-value, it might be significantly slower than call-by-reference, on account of having to copy the entire tuple.
But this falls squarely into 'implementation detail' - if you're so inclined, you could implement either CBV or CBR in hundreds of other ways. Certainly from the perspective of time-independent program behaviour you shouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Basically, trying to crank out games quickly isn't really a recipe for success. It is a good starting place for creative ideas, though. You can start a project with one thing in mind, build it up to a certain stage, leave it a while to think about, and later come back and iterate on the whole concept.
But if you are looking for reliable success in games, the time spent is way more important.