Panel:


Eric Berry
Charles Max Wood
Nate Hopkins


Special Guest: Paul Smith and Andrew Mason

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panelists talk with Paul Smith and Andrew Mason! They discuss the platforms Lucky and Crystal. Other topics include: Ruby, Phoenix, Laravel Mix, Thoughtbot, Webpack, compilers, and much more! Check it out!

Show Topics:

0:00 – Advertisement: Sentry.io

1:02 – Chuck: Welcome!! Eric Berry, Nate Hopkins, and myself are the panel - and our special guests are Paul Smith and Andrew Mason. Introduce yourself!

1:41 – Andrew / Guest: I have messed with every type of language, so there’s that!

1:55 – Paul / Guest: I have been here at my current company for 5 years and it’s a consultancy firm. I have been working on Crystal.

2:14 – Chuck: We are lucky to have you! Give people the elevator pitch for Lucky and Crystal?

2:33 – Guest: Let’s talk about Crystal and looks very similar to Ruby! It’s faster and it’s a compound language. It catches a fair amount of things at compile time. The other special features are...

4:17 – Guest mentions compilers.

4:23 – Chuck: Yeah we see this in the typescript. Is it language service – is that what it’s called? Pile and compile and all of this checking are a nice stage for it to run-through. Although the flipside is coding and to not worry about that – that’s nice!

4:56 – Guest: It has changed my approach for sure.

5:43 – Panel: How much slower are you?

5:54 – Guest: I am a lot faster in Crystal than I am in Ruby.

6:51 – Panel: Yeah you have to figure out where you want to save the time.

7:00 – Guest: Someone wrote a blog post and it said...the Rails service is like bolting a shelf on a wall and hoping to hit a stud and it’s not solid. But using Lucky it’s sold although it took a little longer. I think it can be true. You can do bad things with compilers, though. It depends on how you use it.

7:43 – Panelist asks a question.

7:53 – Guest: Every Friday is an investment day. Lucky is my “whatever I want thing.” I am technically getting paid to work on it.

8:33 – Panel: have you had to battle with the framework?

8:51 – Guest: Yes, even though Crystal looks like Ruby (at a high level) if you want to do it well you have to approach it in the Crystal-way. When I came to Crystal I came to it like Rails. The problem with that is I wanted to have type-saved parameters – you can’t do that in Crystal b/c...it doesn’t know when to have a parameter with...

10:48 – Panel: I have heard you talk about Crystal before on another podcast. You talked about templating and I am curious to hear about that. I have used Slim and others and now stick to ERB.

11:25 – Guest: Yes definitely. Let’s back up and talk about WHAT Lucky does!

The guest talks about Rails, escaping, and more!

14:37 – Panel: So I imagine Rails partials are slow and expensive to render. I would imagine that this approach with Lucky...

15:00 – Guest: Yes exactly. It’s extremely fast!

15:20 – Panel: How is this for designers?

15:30 – Guest: Yes that was a concern of mine. With Lucky I tried to make it close to a regular HTML structure would look like!

16:32 – Panel: I spun up a Lucky app the other day. It looks like you are using...

16:50 – Guest: I have played around with a bunch of stuff. I landed on Laravel Mix.

18:27 – Panel: Yes webpack is a pain to set up and it’s hard to get it to working the way you want it to work.

18:47 – Guest: Yeah if you want React or whatever it will generate the configuration you need. I don’t like it b/c if you want to...

19:28 – Panel.

19:45 – Guest: I don’t want to maintain it.

19:54 – Panel: There is a Crystal community in Utah. I want to know – are you competing with Amber? Explain the difference between Lucky and Amber?

20:20 – Guest: Yes I did look at Amber but they are approaching it differently than us.

The guest talks about the differences between Amber and Lucky.

21:54 – Guest (continues): With Lucky you will have to learn a little bit more but you get more