I don't understand why Ruby's syntax is seen as so elegant. It's ambiguous and a nightmare to parse.<p><a href="http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-parse-ruby" rel="nofollow">http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-par...</a>
Crystal looks like a neat language, and it's fun to see how many entrants there are in the modern renaissance of scripting languages that compile to native code. I wish there was some more documentation about it though... for example, does the bullet point "Never have to specify the type of a variable or method argument" from the home page imply gradual typing as per Dart and TypeScript, or is it something else entirely?
I'm looking for something beautiful like Ruby but fast like Go. Do you think Crystal fits this bill?<p>Also, are there packages/libs/gems for Crystal? What are they called? What do I google for?<p>One of the major reasons why I dumped Go is that it's just too verbose and makes me write too much boilerplate code. I want to sort a collection and I have to write the same algorithm every single time for every single type. It's just boring and my time could be better spent elsewhere.<p>I appreciate the feedback HN!
I'm a go user right now, but I really want to ditch it because I'm in total disarray with the way the go language is managed and the deafness of the go team. Been looking at D,Nim and Crystal.<p>- D is neat but I'm not interested at all in unsafe stuffs and don't want to have to debug programs or 3rd party libs that relies on that, I want a safe language.<p>- Nim looks really good, although some features like (foo_bar = FooBar ) are just disgusting<p>- While Crystal is new and libs is non existent, it feels like a good candidate for the long run. I hope it will have the same concurrency capabilities as go. Good luck with the language.
<a href="http://crystal-lang.org/2013/07/13/null-pointer-exception.html" rel="nofollow">http://crystal-lang.org/2013/07/13/null-pointer-exception.ht...</a><p>The Null pointer analysis is great, hope this stuff pollinates some of the more mainstream languages
I love that we're getting new languages lately, but almost all of them seem to be ignore the significant new requirement of our age: parallelism & concurrency.<p>Specifically, you need lightweight processes and no-shared-memroy architecture.<p>While the number of cores on a machine is remaining relatively low, the number of machines in a system are going up.<p>Erlang got this right and build a lot of infrastructure around it (OTP) and while you can't replicate that infrastructure quickly you can get the fundamentals right.<p>Simply getting this wrong rules out a lot of languages from consideration (because why learn a new language that is going to be obsolete, or only chosen by people who don't understand how to build systems?)<p>It's a lot easier to get this in when you're new and can make major changes to the language. Once you start to solidify it would break things- this is why Go's fake concurrency is a tragedy and a huge missed opportunity.
How long did it take to become self hosting? I checked the first tag on GitHub and it was still implemented in Crystal. Did you originally implement it in C or another language?
I've been looking at the benchmarks <a href="https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks</a> and am pleasantly surprised about the speed. It definitely smokes Ruby, but also is usually faster than Go. I know that all benchmarks are relative but Crystal seems a great language from a performance viewpoint.
Wow! Ruby was the first programming language I learnt and I still love it. Crystal is going to add features I've always missed: static typing and compilation. Thank you guys, it will be awesome!
At first look, I like it. Would be great if we can build a ruby-to-crystal bridge so all the ruby goodness can run on top of it without requiring programmers to learn a whole new language. No GIL, faster than ruby but syntactically close enough, the dream.
I made a Crystal Language Web/Git information collection pages.
<a href="https://github.com/nob-suz/crystal/wiki/1.-Read-First-%28general%29" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nob-suz/crystal/wiki/1.-Read-First-%28gen...</a><p>See Wiki 1. to 9.
If you enjoy your first try for Crystal Language, it's nice.
Wow, I started designing a language called Crystal in the 90s, which a) looks similar to this, and b) I'm pretty sure I even bought the domain crystal-lang.org at one point, but I never did anything with it! I had a very similar logo too :)