31–40 of 94 posts
> What’s awesome about Ruby? > Dynamically typed As someone who has experienced the joy and at least some feeling of safety from moving to typescript from javascript, I would seriously question that dynamic typing is awesome.
> Crystalian [being the name for Crystal users/evangelists] Man, there have to be better alternatives than this. Did you try “crystacean?” Chuckles in .rs.
Crystal is a lovely language. The language community is small though, and learning resources are also small. The story for Crystal is the same story for many programming languages: grow the interest of users, and find generous funding. My impression is that not many Ruby programmers have switched to Crystal. The slow(ish) Crystal compilation will not please Ruby users. And Crystal for Windows is still in beta. Despit…
I don't know what's the general opinion, but distribution for dynamic languages is a nightmare (and I'm including intra-machine, ie. switching between environments).
Personally, I'd be thrilled to trade off speed of compilation for distribution simplicity!
> My impression is that not many Ruby programmers have switched to Crystal.
This depends on the context of moving - professional projects, or hobby programming. Every once in a while somebody pops up saying that they've switched for hobby projects (mostly, scripts).
I'd love to switch, also professionally (that is, for certain parts of my professional project), however, lack of (release quality) parallelism is a dealbraker for me. It's mostly a matter of long-term trust - I personally don't trust a programming language that in 2022 doesn't support parallelism. Ironically, Ruby now has it (even if in limited form).
Development of 3d party libraries are also in vicious circle (few libraries -> few devs -> few libraries). Lack of (release quality) AWS SDK, for starters, is a dealbreaker.
I fucking love Crystal and Ruby. Never has a language literally made me happy like those two. " Amazement wow is this how easy I can achieve this. This is incredible!!!". Conversely Perl and C++ made me miserable, as I tried and tried and gave up learning them. I prefer Excel formulae to working with them.
You compare to rather new, and "geared to learners", languages to some old and know-to-be-arcane languages.
I'd be curious what you think of, for instance, Kotlin and Elm.
> What’s awesome about Ruby? > Dynamically typed As someone who has experienced the joy and at least some feeling of safety from moving to typescript from javascript, I would seriously question that dynamic typing is awesome.
not all dynamically typed languages are the same, Ruby is strongly typed and JavaScript is generally described as a weakly typed language.
Ruby does not do as many automatic casts as JS. In this regard it may be seen as "stronger".
> Crystalian [being the name for Crystal users/evangelists] Man, there have to be better alternatives than this. Did you try “crystacean?” Chuckles in .rs.
Crystal is a lovely language. The language community is small though, and learning resources are also small. The story for Crystal is the same story for many programming languages: grow the interest of users, and find generous funding. My impression is that not many Ruby programmers have switched to Crystal. The slow(ish) Crystal compilation will not please Ruby users. And Crystal for Windows is still in beta. Despit…
it's the same thing for Elixir as well. they have successfully wooed a few Ruby programmers but not many have completely switched to using Elixir. Again some companies using Elixir are those that want to migrate away from Ruby.
it takes quite a while for a new hot language to become extremely popular and then go on to replace other popular mainstream languages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not all dynamically typed languages are the same, Ruby is strongly typed and JavaScript is generally described as a weakly typed language.
The word "strong" is not well defined in this context. But usually it is used for languages like Haskell, Idris, PureScript and Elm. Ruby does not do as many automatic casts as JS. In this regard it may be seen as "stronger".
Crystal has static type checking though.
How is wasm support going? I know they have to "throw away" many of their inventions in lieu of single threads and untouchable stacks, but the core of type inference still maps well to wasm (?)
Crystal is a lovely language. The language community is small though, and learning resources are also small. The story for Crystal is the same story for many programming languages: grow the interest of users, and find generous funding. My impression is that not many Ruby programmers have switched to Crystal. The slow(ish) Crystal compilation will not please Ruby users. And Crystal for Windows is still in beta. Despit…
> The story for Crystal is the same story for many programming languages: grow the interest of users, and find generous funding. it's the same thing for Elixir as well. they have successfully wooed a few Ruby programmers but not many have completely switched to using Elixir. Again some companies using Elixir are those that want to migrate away from Ruby. it takes quite a while for a new hot language to become extreme…
As I mainly use ruby for scripting, Crystal has been replacing ruby's role for me for 3+ years and I don't even find anything that really missing, except for maybe a decent ORM like Sequel.