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How can you compare the overall developer experience of Crystal, which isn't even 1.0 yet and has very few libraries, with the mature ecosystem of Rails?
by cutler 8y ago
How can you compare the overall developer experience of Crystal, which isn't even 1.0 yet and has very few libraries, with the mature ecosystem of Rails?
- freedomben 8y agoNot OP, and not Crystal, but comparing Phoenix ecosystem with Rails is pretty doable. There are a lot of packages available. Obviously not as much as on rubygems, but one can get a pretty good feel for the overall developer experience. My enjoyment of rails isn't really about the wide array of gems available anyway. It's the paradigms and community standards.
- joelbluminator 8y agoRails is also very powerful because of hundreds of thousands of answers on Stackoverflow and countless blogs. It's not easy to reach that level.
- everdev 8y agoYou're right that the major downside I can see is the ecosystem is not as big. But when I jumped into Rails over a decade ago, the Ruby/Rails ecosystem was not huge yet either. But, static typing and being able to compile and deploy a binary is a pretty sweet developer experience. And the syntax is nearly identical to Ruby with a few nice additions. Many companies like ThoughtBot (a huge Ruby adopter) are jumping into Crystal. The future is definitely in compiled/static languages IMO.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nasmorn 8y agoIf you mean your future, you could certainly be right. But if you mean the future of all programming I would like to say that compiled/static languages are in fact the past. They are super useful and given a complicated enough problem/ sophisticated enough programmer they will look like a good enough solution for all problems. But ... Wordpress
- handbanana 8y agoWhy are they a thing of the past?
- nasmorn 8y agoBecause in the past they dominated everything. This will not happen again. For some problems/people the ease of dynamic languages are simply more important than the correctness/speed issues you deem as paramount. I don’t mean no one will or should use static languages but believing they will once again dominate like in the 80s and 90s is an illusion imo
- temporaryacc62 8y agoIf only there were types in Elixir to get rid of those damn nulls... Supposedly someone is making a Typescript-like precompiler for Elixir (with ML syntax of course). We are all hoping it succeeds!
- OvermindDL1 8y agoEh, as far as I know I'm the only one doing that, and even then only as an experiment/playground, and I don't have the time to work on it lately (have to pay the bills after all). It's not compiling to elixir, but the `alpaca` language compiles to the BEAM (via erlang core I think) so it gets you close, although they are not black boxing messages sadly. If you know of someone else doing typing experiments on top of elixir, please link me (my playground code is on my github repo somewhere)!!!
- joelbluminator 8y agoThis. If I was a CTO I would never ever choose Crystal, or Elixir, or Kotlin. Give me a proven, "old", battled tested framework with tons of resources that's easy to teach, learn and get sh done with. I'd choose PHP over Elixir for a new business.
- karmajunkie 8y agoI can't tell if you're trolling here or you geniunely don't realize that the foundation of Elixir is older than PHP.
- mercer 8y agoI get the idea behind your comment, but without context it's pretty stupid. There are plenty of use cases where Elixir might be a much better choice than PHP, but it depends entirely on what you're trying to do. I sincerely hope you're not a CTO of a company where PHP is not the right approach... (that said, I do agree that often PHP is a fine choice, and people might overcomplicate things needlessly by choosing something else)