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.
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.
Windows status: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/5430
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Ruby does not do as many automatic casts as JS. In this regard it may be seen as "stronger".
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?
Do you know something like awesome-training resourses for Crystal?
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.
Man, there have to be better alternatives than this.
Did you try “crystacean?” Chuckles in .rs.
