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by chrisseaton 1521 days ago
My argument is - if you swapped out the syntax of Crystal to not look like Ruby, would anyone think 'this is like Ruby'. I don't think so. Super fundamental parts of the language semantics, like method dispatch rules, are completely different between Ruby and Crystal.

> Your criticism does not seem rigorously considered.

I'm a major contributor to the Ruby specifcation, and I've got a decade of full-time experience in writing about and implementing Ruby and its semantics, so I'm not just doing a drive-by comment.
3 comments
viraptor 1520 days ago
It still has a very similar feel to Ruby. A lot of the standard library is a very close match to Ruby. And the metaprogramming bits are possible to simulate with macros.

I find this discussion often go into the weird "it's static Ruby" / "not almost nothing like Ruby" extremes. I'd go with looks - same, feel - very familiar, inner workings - you can find ways around differences.

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sethrin 1520 days ago
Suffice it to say that I don't think the details of message passing are what most people care about with Ruby. I can see how your experience would lead you to believe otherwise.
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eropple 1520 days ago
I strongly disagree. The message passing semantics are a pretty core part of why you can write pretty complex metaprogramming in Ruby and, without writing a lot of code, make a lot of stuff happen. And even somebody who "doesn't care" about that is critically indebted to it--because that's how Rails happens.

This is not always for the best, of course, but I reach for Ruby pretty consistently when I need to do that sort of thing--often in a dynamic programming context or where I'm binding a lot of state to present a straightforward DSL to an end user (which Sorbet helps with quite a lot, too). Sometimes, for practical reasons, I'll do that sort of work in TypeScript, but the result usually has a lot more sandpaper to it.

Crystal...just isn't that. At all. It's a fine language for what it is; it doesn't just offer anything that Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, and Rust don't, so I have no use for it. But it's definitely not Ruby and it doesn't even smell like Ruby.

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chrisseaton 1520 days ago
> because that's how Rails happens

Bingo.

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bb88 1520 days ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted there. But you've made a good point.
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