Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

> Rooby is a Ruby-like object oriented language written in Go. You can think it as a simplified, compilable Ruby for now.

I have to ask, if your goal is "compilable Ruby", then...why not Crystal? (https://crystal-lang.org/ ) Seems like it accomplishes your goals, already exists, and is (as far as I know) stable and well regarded.

Nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel, and you may have very compelling reasons to write your own project. But it looks weird when there's already a well-known project in this space and you don't compare yourself to it. How are you better?

View on HN

Not written in Go maybe? Many of these language projects are people's hobby projects. They like to pick a language they either know'n'love or want to get more proficient in. (edit: nothing wrong with that!)

Quite right. And there's nothing wrong with that!

But it's good to know if the author's main issue with Crystal is that it <lacks important feature X> or if it's that it's not written in Go, which is a barrier for him to contribute. Both are very valid reasons to start a new project, but it's good info to have. :)

> And there's nothing wrong with that!

I was not implying a problem with that. I'll try to make that more clear by an edit.

Crystal is written in crystal so everyone has an equal barrier to entry

In terms of Crystal vs Go, I've heard that Crystal is slightly faster but that Go is more portable and has much better concurrency? Is that not accurate?

Currently that's true, but we aim to have better concurrency than go at the point of 1.0. Crystal can probably also gain more architectures faster due to llvm. It's only about a week's worth of work (at most) to port Crystal to a posix target that has LLVM support.

I just wish pet hobby language projects stopped making it to the top of HN. That's where asking why is it better is important.

> How are you better?

It's a valid question to ask but I don't think anyone has to think that through and really have a good answer before creating!

I found the author posted this on Changelog:

Hi, Rooby is a new object oriented language I created recently (written in Go). It looks just like Ruby for now because it's mainly inspired by it. But I want it to be a new language and start developing its own feature when it gets more mature. So I'm looking for developers who also interested in this project, any help or idea will help me a lot.

https://github.com/thechangelog/ping/issues/698

Crystal actually has quite a few features unique to Crystal too! I'd love to hear the author's ideas of how he wants to improve Ruby, maybe some of those ideas are still applicable to Crystal.

I'd argue there's a lot wrong with reinventing the wheel. People don't seem to care about the inevitable waste of programmer time and effort that comes with introducing a new programming language or library, assuming it gains any traction.

> assuming it gains any traction.

There's little risk of that I think; even very strong and innovative languages struggle to gain traction. It doesn't tend to happen by accident.

And let's not forget that writing your own ORM, compiler, programming language, hardware driver, etc., (even blog engine!) is an amazing way to learn. But it is good to know whether a project is a hobby project to help learn, or a serious project aimed at getting traction, or what.

>> But it is good to know whether a project is a hobby project to help learn, or a serious project aimed at getting traction, or what.

Most programming projects start with the intention of the latter but usually end up becoming the former.

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)

Linus Torvalds 1991

Minecraft is another good example.

I think it's the other way around.

Most projects start out as a hobby / experiment and a tiny fraction of those become popular.

> It doesn't tend to happen by accident.

I don't know, C++ is pretty popular. ;)

I (and everyone else) am allowed to waste precisely as much time as I feel like both as a creator and user of things.

By reinventing the wheel we've gotten much better wheels.

There's a difference between improving something and reinventing it.

Use of time for things that the programmer values, even if you don't, is not a waste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com