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.
I usually only need to run it a few times towards the end of writing a feature to see if the compiler or specs catches any errors.
I'm constantly editing code then directing my attention to my browser to see the results. This is independent of CSS or JS changes that might be picked up by asset watching tools like esbuild or tailwind's CLI tool.
Weird statement. Software distribution generally is pretty terrible, 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.
Github's Hub tool is a good example.
It was originally written in Ruby. This requires that the user:
- may need to handle a certain environment in terms of Ruby interpreter (potentially install a new version)
- may need to handle a certain libraries group (gemsets in RVM)
- needs to install dependencies
- needs to handle switching to the appropriate Ruby interpreter version and libraries group
Especially point 3 is a pain.
Even just installing everything as system Ruby won't work, because often, different Ruby interpreter versions are required.
Once they moved to Golang:
- the distributor compiles for different platforms
- the user downloads the given version for their O/S
That's all.
Where does the generalization to dynamic vs. static languages come from?
> Github's Hub tool is a good example.
I gave an example already—a counterexample, that is. Was there something wrong with it?
>> the distributor compiles for different platforms
Most people aren't doing that for you. There are lots of tools out there where you do need to still manually compile it yourself and make sure you have the appropriate dependencies which will still be painful. That being said, I agree that shipping a script can be a problem, but lots of people use Brew and that seems to work ok.
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.