Oh man I just love and adore Crystal. I am a long time rubyist and I have to say they just nailed it with Crystal. I just wish I had more opportunity to use it professionally!
It must be time to take my Ruby skills and go and learn this. Is it really as easy as it sounds like it should be for a lazy, dynamic-typing sort of Ruby dev to pick up?
If you have never worked with a strongly typed language before there might be some getting used to that, but any pain is well worth it. Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing. Oh and it’s literally 100x faster than Ruby in some cases.
> Catching all your mistakes at compile time and not at runtime is so amazing
It would be, but IME Crystal, or statically typed programming languages that don't have a type system at least as powerful as Haskells in general, don't get anywhere remotely close to that, and the overhead added to get what they do give is of dubious net benefit outside of large projects.
And even with Haskell, while you can express a much richer set of constraints in types, there's also more space for bugs in the type level programming.
I don't get it. How many types do I need, before the kind of data I am talking about becomes better represented by an object comprised of smaller pieces?
Why would I want to spend my time "type level programming"?
Maybe I don't understand what's meant by a type. Is it on the level of string/double/int, or is it expected to cover more (string with a well formatted ISO 8601 datetime, etc)? What is accomplished that couldn't be done in vanilla Ruby with an object representing a more complex datatype with its own getters/setters to cover validation?