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Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

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31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#31
post #6

> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL Impossible, or just hard?

The main difference between compiled and static languages is that compiled languages go through a phase of "checking your work", where it compares parts of your program to other parts before running it. For example, if you misspelled a name, the compiler will look everywhere in your program for that name before you run it, and tell you it can't find the name. That's why we like compiled languages. By contrast, dynami…

This explains it a lot better than I do in the article.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#32
post #26
post #16

> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL First of all, the problem isn't that it's "compiled" - Python is "compiled" too, but still has one of the best REPLs available. The problem is that the language is static. But static (and compiled) languages can have REPLs, for example C++ has an excellent REPL called Cling. It's not impossible, just requires some more effort. As for Crystal, it look…

Yeah, to clarify this should be possible, but I don't think it's going to happen for some time. There is a shard that creates a REPL, but it re-executes all previously executed commands each time you enter something new, which is super bad and dangerous. What we need is something that will compile just the line that was entered, and somehow "inject" that line into the existing program, and execute only that next line…

Both scala and Java provides a REPL by compiling each lines + maintaining a context containing all local variables, functions, classes, etc

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#33
I've been keeping my eye on Crystal for a while now thinking about making the plunge and writing something production ready in it.

But I'm a bit vary as for the casual observer the Crystal project github (https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal) seems brim with unsolved issues (over 500 issues!) and stale PR-s (over 105!). I'm not sure if this is a sign of poor project managment, development stall or poor community engagement but still it leaves a bad first impression. Contrast this to elixir project page (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir).

Maybe someone who is actively involved in the development of Crystal could shine a light?

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#34
post #29

I'm reading through the list and it looks like D has all these, except the ninth one ("meteoric rise in popularity"). However, it does have binary compatibility with C and the binaries are much leaner.

Both are also difficult to google search XD

Searching for "dlang" returns decent/passable results.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#35
I never seem to be able to get into all of these new languages, mostly because I do not see a clear use case for it. The last two languages I learnt were Python, because we have our backend written in it and Swift for a personal project because it is what one writes iOS apps in today.

I fail to imagine a kind of application that would warrant to learn a new general purpose language on top of what I already know. Well, except massive parallelism for which I would probably reach for Erlang or Go.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#36

> Recently Crystal shocked the world when it rose from 60th place to 32nd place in the Tiobe index in a mere month Meteoric! Because we all know the the Tiobe index is incredibly accurate. Would have been nice to see some code examples, rather than just handwavey bullets points that you could write about nearly every up-and-coming programming language.

Also, "meteoric rise" is kind of silly. That's not how meteors work.

A meteoric rise means a rise up into the sky.

Meteoros is Latin and means "to raise up", usually into the sky. Hence "meteorology" which is the study of the sky and "meteors" which are bright lights in the sky.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#37
post #24

hey guys OP here just a note on parallelism -- once windows support is done (very soon), parallelism is the #1 priority of the dev team. If you are looking for syntax examples check out the docs there are tons of examples here: https://crystal-lang.org/docs/syntax_and_semantics/

I think not having a parallelism first mindset will be the killer of the language. It's too important in today's world to not have that be an essential part of the language from the beginning. Rust and go for example we're 100% designed around parallelism.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#38
post #26
post #16

> Because Crystal is compiled, it is impossible to have a true REPL First of all, the problem isn't that it's "compiled" - Python is "compiled" too, but still has one of the best REPLs available. The problem is that the language is static. But static (and compiled) languages can have REPLs, for example C++ has an excellent REPL called Cling. It's not impossible, just requires some more effort. As for Crystal, it look…

Yeah, to clarify this should be possible, but I don't think it's going to happen for some time. There is a shard that creates a REPL, but it re-executes all previously executed commands each time you enter something new, which is super bad and dangerous. What we need is something that will compile just the line that was entered, and somehow "inject" that line into the existing program, and execute only that next line…

Check Swift Playground demos.

Re: Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "meteoric rise" is kind of silly. That's not how meteors work.

A meteoric rise means a rise up into the sky. Meteoros is Latin and means "to raise up", usually into the sky. Hence "meteorology" which is the study of the sky and "meteors" which are bright lights in the sky.

TIL, thanks
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