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Discussion on: We created the Crystal language, ask us anything!

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jgaskins profile image
Jamie Gaskins

How do you determine how closely to align with Ruby?

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matiasgarciaisaia profile image
Matías García Isaía

In the beginning, there was some idea to be Ruby-compatible. But, as always - you start developing your idea, and things change. We found there were concepts/patterns that didn't fit that well because of the differences between the languages (type system, mainly), and we found opportunities to do things in a way that we liked better than Ruby - so we did it.

I personally love Ary's talk at Øredev 2016 - I didn't even know some of those programming languages that actually are an influence in Crystal! Ruby's influence is the easiest to see, because of the syntax, but you can see Go's concurrency model, Swift's non-nilable types, you-name-it.

So, in a nutshell - "joy". We align as closely with Ruby as we feel it's wise to - just like with the other languages 🙃