Crystal is supposed to be fast, and type safe, with an easy syntax. This might help people try it, because they still can fall back on python, and get hooked.
It is insanely fast. Some text munging python script once told me it would take 14 hours. I ported it to Crystal in 40 minutes, and it completed ten minutes later.
To be fair, there are lots of tricks to get stuff moving faster in Python, usually by invoking some module that delegates to native code. This was, IIRC, doing everything in the most straightforward way. But I did port the source code essentially line-by-line and this was within the first week of using Crystal. Any grave (i. e. measurable in O-notation) errors would have just carried over, and no sophistication was involved in my Crystal code.
Yeah, that's the thought - reduce the friction for converting Python to Crystal. I wouldn't expect many non-trivial programs to work out of the box, but if this tool reduces the time needed to port something, it's served its purpose.
It's more "Not by AWS", but yeah - that makes it non-free. Stallman would be rolling over in his grave, if he wasn't still alive to write an email about it in emacs.
It's a Java/.NET/JS-style VM target. So you can distribute your app with a single binary download, instead of different ones for different Operating Systems.
Then submit that to HN, showcasing what wapm can really do.
Instead, people here are rightly cynical. I do not want another private company managing something as fundamental as a package registry.
I want them to answer my question about how they are actually going to fund themselves. Especially with the dubious decision to pay for office space in San Francisco.
I don't deny that open source is now more prevalent than it was in the past, I just don't think it's on the verge of taking over the world, where every sector will be open source, especially in the ridiculously short timeline of 12-24 months you stated in the article. There's too much value for certain industries, sectors, or companies to keep some, or even most things close to the chest, and there are plenty of companies that haven't been convinced that opening up their codebase would be worth the extra time and effort it would take to do so.
You didn't even address my example of the game industry, so I have no choice but to assume you either agree with me for that industry or just don't have any way to disprove it.
Yes, Microsoft, once known as the chief closed-source proponent, is now embracing open source more, but that's a single company with completely different management than it had ten years ago and in an environment where they're no longer the king of the development world. And in particular for developers, being more open is usually a good thing because it gives us more freedom when developing. But that's only one sector of the programming world.
I have worked for at least a dozen companies over the years, and while I've incorporated at least little pieces of open source software or libraries in most of those jobs, the resulting codebases for those companies was never opened up, nor was there ever any talk about possibly opening it up. We were generally always too busy working on the next iteration to worry about opening our software up or dealing with that. Additionally, at least once I recall us rewriting our application to remove an open source portal software (uPortal) it relied heavily upon because uPortal was just a convoluted, restrictive mess to try to do any real customization with it.
And quoting William Gibson, is cute, yet proves nothing. He's a talented writer who tells good, believable stories about future technology, but he's hardly a prophet.
You could put it in a private repo on Github and have the contribution graph visible.
If you work for someone else you can advocate for this. If you employ coders you can use it as a talent attraction piece, or just do it because it's a good thing to do for them.
