7 ms·

The idea behind crystal is not to make a faster ruby, but to make a rethought ruby for the modern age: compiled, statically typed and removed of warts. Crystal

by RX14 10y ago

The idea behind crystal is not to make a faster ruby, but to make a rethought ruby for the modern age: compiled, statically typed and removed of warts. Crystal should feel familiar to ruby developers in it's syntax and stdlib, but we have absolutely no problems with throwing away ruby's ideas when they are deemed substandard. Crystal doesn't aim to draw in as many ruby developers as possible, it aims to create the best programming language possible. It just happens to have ruby as a conceptual starting point.

vidarh 10y ago
I can understand that, but a lot of the difference to me seem like they make moving code over harder without providing any benefit. For me that makes it substantially less likely that I'll use it, but that's fine.
cookiecaper 10y ago
It seems like Ruby is a bit of a small community to target with this type of thing. Wouldn't Ruby developers be better served by moving on to one of the several other idealistic languages in widespread usage right now? TypeScript is getting good reviews and Python is great. I know it seems harsh, but when I hear people talk about the "beauty" or "elegance" of Ruby, I just think of someone who started coding in the 2005-2009 era and started out with RoR, which was frequently presented as "the Mac of programming languages" around that time (and this description alone should give serious people pause). These people got into the scene too late to remember trying to hack Perl, Ruby's own spiritual predecessor, and the pseudo-joke that it was a "write-only language". The two relics that remain from widespread Perl usage are regular expressions and Ruby. Meanwhile, several other languages that are similar to Ruby in age and/or style have active communities and enjoy an increasing trend of innovation and market penetration. Even languages like Groovy, which have failed to gain a large independent following, continue to benefit from both technical and communal innovation on their underlying runtime platforms. I don't think I've met many people who looked at Ruby in a time when the hype train wasn't going full steam ahead and came away with the evaluation that it was "elegant" or "beautiful". In fact, many reformed "Rubyists" whom I know are switching to other platforms, and RoR jobs are getting increasingly scarce (supplanted by the next large-scale server-side fad, node.js). Not many people seem to be using Ruby for new projects anymore. Could you elaborate on why you chose Ruby as a reference point?
- vidarh 10y ago
  > I know it seems harsh, but when I hear people talk about the "beauty" or "elegance" of Ruby, I just think of someone who started coding in the 2005-2009 era and started out with RoR I started programming in 1981, I detest Rails, and I picked Ruby for its beauty and elegance. I'm a language geek first and foremost; the syntax and presentation of a language is extremely important for my happiness when working with it, and nothing has so far gotten close to Ruby in that respect, and I've worked in more languages than most developers can name. TypeScript and Python both looks awful to me. Neither are languages I'll work in given a choice. I don't think you'll find many Rubyists who'd consider them viable alternatives - those who have evaluated both and come down on the Ruby side tends to have strong opinions on the matter in my experience. > In fact, many reformed "Rubyists" whom I know are switching to other platforms, and RoR jobs are getting increasingly scarce (supplanted by the next large-scale server-side fad, node.js). Not many people seem to be using Ruby for new projects anymore. My experience is the exact opposite. It's easier than ever for me to find work doing Ruby even while avoiding Rails. I'm too expensive to do Rails even I liked it. Yet I regularly find devops consulting gigs and the like where people are happy to find someone with Ruby skills. If RoR jobs are indeed getting scarce, I suspect that's more an effect of the number of Ruby developers reaching the kind of saturation that PHP developers did years ago. But these things are also highly dependent on where you look. I rarely come across people asking for node.js for example. Presumably because my network is tilted towards Rubyists.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Can you discuss some of the linguistic edges that you find in Ruby? Personally, I don't understand the attraction. It would help if you could articulate. I've always struggled to see the real merit that Ruby brought to the table. Usually such explanations are things like "Look at all the esoteric symbols I can pack together to accomplish something on two lines, instead of the readable way that would've used six lines!" IMO, it's better to use a few extra bytes for line breaks, or for explicit wrapping of things like method arguments, and have your code more accessible. Unless you're engaging in the above-referenced symbolic soup, Python and Ruby code usually end up looking pretty similar. I don't know how you can say that one "looks awful" v. the other.

by RX14 10y ago

vidarh 10y ago

I can understand that, but a lot of the difference to me seem like they make moving code over harder without providing any benefit. For me that makes it substantially less likely that I'll use it, but that's fine.

cookiecaper 10y ago

It seems like Ruby is a bit of a small community to target with this type of thing. Wouldn't Ruby developers be better served by moving on to one of the several other idealistic languages in widespread usage right now? TypeScript is getting good reviews and Python is great. I know it seems harsh, but when I hear people talk about the "beauty" or "elegance" of Ruby, I just think of someone who started coding in the 2005-2009 era and started out with RoR, which was frequently presented as "the Mac of programming languages" around that time (and this description alone should give serious people pause). These people got into the scene too late to remember trying to hack Perl, Ruby's own spiritual predecessor, and the pseudo-joke that it was a "write-only language". The two relics that remain from widespread Perl usage are regular expressions and Ruby. Meanwhile, several other languages that are similar to Ruby in age and/or style have active communities and enjoy an increasing trend of innovation and market penetration. Even languages like Groovy, which have failed to gain a large independent following, continue to benefit from both technical and communal innovation on their underlying runtime platforms. I don't think I've met many people who looked at Ruby in a time when the hype train wasn't going full steam ahead and came away with the evaluation that it was "elegant" or "beautiful". In fact, many reformed "Rubyists" whom I know are switching to other platforms, and RoR jobs are getting increasingly scarce (supplanted by the next large-scale server-side fad, node.js). Not many people seem to be using Ruby for new projects anymore. Could you elaborate on why you chose Ruby as a reference point?

vidarh 10y ago
> I know it seems harsh, but when I hear people talk about the "beauty" or "elegance" of Ruby, I just think of someone who started coding in the 2005-2009 era and started out with RoR I started programming in 1981, I detest Rails, and I picked Ruby for its beauty and elegance. I'm a language geek first and foremost; the syntax and presentation of a language is extremely important for my happiness when working with it, and nothing has so far gotten close to Ruby in that respect, and I've worked in more languages than most developers can name. TypeScript and Python both looks awful to me. Neither are languages I'll work in given a choice. I don't think you'll find many Rubyists who'd consider them viable alternatives - those who have evaluated both and come down on the Ruby side tends to have strong opinions on the matter in my experience. > In fact, many reformed "Rubyists" whom I know are switching to other platforms, and RoR jobs are getting increasingly scarce (supplanted by the next large-scale server-side fad, node.js). Not many people seem to be using Ruby for new projects anymore. My experience is the exact opposite. It's easier than ever for me to find work doing Ruby even while avoiding Rails. I'm too expensive to do Rails even I liked it. Yet I regularly find devops consulting gigs and the like where people are happy to find someone with Ruby skills. If RoR jobs are indeed getting scarce, I suspect that's more an effect of the number of Ruby developers reaching the kind of saturation that PHP developers did years ago. But these things are also highly dependent on where you look. I rarely come across people asking for node.js for example. Presumably because my network is tilted towards Rubyists.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Can you discuss some of the linguistic edges that you find in Ruby? Personally, I don't understand the attraction. It would help if you could articulate. I've always struggled to see the real merit that Ruby brought to the table. Usually such explanations are things like "Look at all the esoteric symbols I can pack together to accomplish something on two lines, instead of the readable way that would've used six lines!" IMO, it's better to use a few extra bytes for line breaks, or for explicit wrapping of things like method arguments, and have your code more accessible. Unless you're engaging in the above-referenced symbolic soup, Python and Ruby code usually end up looking pretty similar. I don't know how you can say that one "looks awful" v. the other.