Crystal for Rubyists

As someone from the US state of Michigan that has at least two competing demonyms, I actually find the idea of everyone using a different form based on preference to be charming.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Cooks? :-)

unixhero3• 4 years ago

Easy there Jesse

aaaronic• 4 years ago

Geodes?

brianjacobs• 4 years ago

I think this is an underrated response given that any crystal can start as a geode.

amval• 4 years ago

Geodudes?

glenngillen• 4 years ago

Crystian? ;)

squarefoot• 4 years ago

With Crystmas as official language day? I'm in!:)

_joel• 4 years ago

Shardies

verdagon• 4 years ago

Crysties!

config_yml• 4 years ago

Strahler / Fossickers?

rvz• 4 years ago

Crynge.

nix233• 4 years ago

Pfff, yesterday i talked with a Brain fucker...it was terrifying. Can we just stop calling peoples after tools?

sdiacom• 4 years ago

Generally I would agree, but in this case, "Crystal user" isn't that much better.

jspash• 4 years ago

A "tool" is probably the best term for someone who actually uses BF.

tasqyn• 4 years ago

you people must be fun at parties :)

watzon2• 4 years ago

I opt for meth heads

compumike2• 4 years ago

This is great Serdar.

As an alternative to Chapter 2 I’ll also share https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart my project template which lets you get a Crystal (currently 1.6.2) dev environment running with just Docker. Good for kicking the tires, which is what I think your audience is probably wanting to do! And then eventually can install a binary package as you suggest.

beta-ziliani• 4 years ago

Nice! It doesn't work in Windows native, right? Asking because newbies might come from there (although I bet most of them use WSL).

compumike2• 4 years ago

Hmm I don’t know — I don’t have a Windows or WSL setup to test with right now. What breaks?

chillfox4• 4 years ago

It’s getting pretty close.

Windows status: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430

sdogruyol3• 4 years ago

Thanks a lot! Happy to have your PR :) https://github.com/sdogruyol/crystal-for-rubyists-en

bdcravens• 4 years ago

Any way related to the talk given at RubyConf Mini?

http://www.rubyconfmini.com/program#Crystal-for-Rubyists

sdogruyol3• 4 years ago

Nope, this is way before that talk

unixhero3• 4 years ago

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.

cies3• 4 years ago

Perl and C++ made me miserable

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.

xcdzvyn• 4 years ago

And Elixir :)

nurettin• 4 years ago

I pretty much love C++ and would give up my career to be able to work with it again. Especially that feeling of squishing millions of lines of data in milliseconds by running the compiled code. It is pure delight. C did make me pretty miserable, though.

singularity2001• 4 years ago

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 (?)

straight-shoota3• 4 years ago

There has been some progress recently. A big part of stdlib specs already pass on WASM. It's usable for experimentation. A great introduction is available at https://glue.im/noah/introduction-to-webassembly-in-crystal and https://glue.im/noah/webassembly-host-functions-in-crystal

freilanzer2• 4 years ago

With advent of code coming up I'm torn between Kotlin and maybe Crystal.

https://adventofcode.com/

dengolius• 4 years ago

Wow, I'm in with Crystal support :)

Do you know something like awesome-training resourses for Crystal?

freilanzer2• 4 years ago

In general, I tend to look at sites like these for new languages:

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/crystal/

https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Crystal

Otherwise I'll be starting with Crystal as well if I decide to do AoC in it, so I don't know of any other resources either.

straight-shoota3• 4 years ago

https://crystal-lang.org/reference/tutorials/basics/index.ht...

https://crystal-lang.org/learning/

nerdponx2• 4 years ago

Kotlin, Crystal, Nim, Koka, who can decide?

open-source-ux• 4 years ago

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.

Despite these factors, Crystal is a pleasure to use - fast, readable, and a well-featured standard libary.

pizza2342• 4 years ago

The slow(ish) Crystal compilation will not please Ruby users

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.

nickjj2• 4 years ago

Personally, I'd be thrilled to trade off speed of compilation for distribution simplicity!

Technologies like Docker have made distribution a lot easier. I haven't used tools like chruby or rbenv since 2014 when I started using Docker because Docker manages your app's runtime environment. You pull down your built image on your server and run it. There's no complication, sprawling of version managers or surprises.

Personally I think having a fast dev feedback loop is critically important. It's something you experience hundreds of times a day as you're developing your project.

cxr3• 4 years ago

distribution for dynamic languages is a nightmare

Weird statement. Software distribution generally is just a terrible mess, regardless of what sort of language it's written in. The one exception is JS, which happens to be dynamic and also has what is probably the most reliable and ubiquitous platform available—so much so that its distribution story is often credited, rightly or wrongly, as the only reason anyone actually uses it.

Tolexx• 4 years ago

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 extremely popular and then go on to replace other popular mainstream languages.

npn• 4 years ago

I love Elixir, but it is an extremely niche language. It's great for network application, but just doesn't seem to be suitable for a daily driver language. Meanwhile crystal can fit all the bill: you can use it to write small scripts, you can write it for write long running service, you can write it to crunch data (the multi-threading feature of crystal is still an experiment though, but it works well for basic stuff)...

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.

nerdponx2• 4 years ago

To be fair, the slow compilation time is annoying even compared to other compiled languages, particularly Go and Nim, which are similarly "high level".

I also found that the Crystal LSP server was painfully slow, and there seems to be a lack of robust developer tooling in general. Has that improved in the last year or so?

postmodern_mod3• 4 years ago

One minor note:

Crystal achieved basic Windows support as of 2021/11/18. https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430

As of Crystal 1.5.0, Windows support is basically there. https://crystal-lang.org/2022/07/06/1.5.0-released.html

However, Crystal aims to support the lowest common denominator between POSIX and Windows, so not all of the Windows standard APIs are supported out-of-the-box. Other Windows specific libraries will need to be created specifically for Windows users/developers.

azangru2• 4 years ago

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.

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

not all dynamically typed languages are the same, Ruby is strongly typed and JavaScript is generally described as a weakly typed language.

cies3• 4 years ago

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".

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

I’d hardly call ruby strongly typed. There is basically no way to verify anything statically so almost all issues show up in run time. Updating Rails or any gems on a production system is a nightmare where the only option is to have 20,000 unit tests and then hope nothing blows up when you release it.

atmosx2• 4 years ago

Ruby 3 supports type signatures: https://github.com/ruby/rbs

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

The rails creator DHH has indicated that rails would “absolutely not” be getting type support.

Edd314159• 4 years ago

I reject the implication that if dynamic typing is awesome, then static typing is _not_ awesome.

It’s like saying pizza is awesome, therefore ice cream is not.

Both are awesome! It just depends what you’re trying to achieve at that point in time. A language’s type system is not, in absolute terms, an advantage or disadvantage. It’s just a design choice, each with their own trade-offs that we must consider.

Existenceblinks2• 4 years ago

This is the problem when people only know one language, especially javascript. And then have quite naive opinion about programming languages. Ones should try at least all one of big categories; one of ML family, one of C-like, one of Lisp dialect.

azangru2• 4 years ago

This is the problem

Could you state the problem more concretely? Javascript is a cross between Java and Lisp, having a Java-esque C-like syntax, and lisp-like function-as-a-first-class-citizen behavior. Typescript brings it all the way to C#; so the C-like territory is firmly covered. An ML-family language, especially something like Haskell, would only reinforce the admiration for static types. Which languages would lead to the conclusion that dynamic typing is awesome? Lisps?

gregors4• 4 years ago

As someone who was on the type train in Uni and moved to dynamic languages, my first feeling was slow and unsafe. I couldn't imagine how things wouldn't just explode. In practice I've rarely seen issues. Ruby is still the fastest way for me to get a concept working. I'd definitely consider it awesome.

trehalose• 4 years ago

I tend to like when languages are dynamically typed, but I suspect it's not the dynamic typing I like--I think it's that dynamically-typed languages generally have type inference.

I don't like having to write things like `List<int> list = new List<int>`... I find myself thinking, "Why do I need to tell the stupid compiler in the very same line that a new List<int> is a List<int>? Wtf else would it be?!"

When I write in a language such as Kotlin, that's statically typed but has type inference, I feel basically the same lack of resistance as I feel working in dynamically typed languages. Of course, even in such languages, there'll be times when the coder must specify a type, or should specify one for various reasons, but I like when the compiler at least makes an effort, haha.

I like Ruby a lot (and I've tried out Crystal in some recreational programming stuff and like it a lot too), and I think I'd still like it just as much without the dynamic typing.

diminish• 4 years ago

Past discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Crystal%20for%20Rubyists&type=...

sdogruyol3• 4 years ago

There's also a Chinese version at https://cn.crystalforrubyists.com It's not updated for a while though happy to have your PRs :)

gregors4• 4 years ago

It's quite easy for me to churn out some data munging scripts using Ruby but I was running into performance issues on large csv files. Crystal is like having super powers for csv parsing if you already have Ruby skills. I really think it's the sweet spot for the language.

Serg31• 4 years ago

Hey Everyone. I'm looking russian speaking Crystal/Ruby developers for really interesting project with competitive salary. For details, please, contact me via e-mail - veronika.p@eurekaos.com

watzon2• 4 years ago

I've been using Crystal for some 6 years now and it's still my favorite language. It definitely has issues; it's not perfect, but it really hits a good balance between being a fast language with nice features and encouraging the "joy of programming" that Matz is all about. I would love to see it gain popularity eventually.

Crystal for Rubyists

Related Stories