Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

Crystal won't take off because it's an "amateur" language, to have a good and properly supported language you need a lot of poeple and money, which Crystal has not.

I would not rely my business on a language where there is just one full time dev working on it and relying on donations.

View on HN

> because it's an "amateur" language

Python was an amateur language until it was not.

Yes and Python (released in 1991) took a lot more time to become popular compared to Java (released in 1995) which was corporate backed.

Python still seems to have funding issues. For example, JS (backed by multiple big corporations) performance has improved a lot compared to Python. The main Python implementation doesn't have a proper JIT as far as I know.

So it shows the difference between amateur languages and corporate backed languages.

> Yes and Python (released in 1991) took a lot more time to become popular compared to Java (released in 1995) which was corporate backed.

Being corporate backed is the real answer. Languages that became popular through grassroots support are the exception, not the rule.

Even Rust started as a "amateur" language until it was picked up by Rust.

Nothing is saying that Crystal won't be picked up just like Rust was, by some company.

> Even Rust started as a "amateur" language until it was picked up by Rust

?!?

Mozilla maybe?

What a brain fart. Yeah, I meant "picked up by Mozilla", thanks :)

This isn't quite true. Python was certainly Guido's passion project, and it started that way. But early in its life, it was funded by the United States government via CNRI (under Bob Kahn).

At every job Guido had subsequently, he had at least some buy-in to work on Python, and some coworkers were also paid to work on Python.

There was a core "PythonLabs" group (I think including Jeremy Hylton?) that apparently moved from CNRI to the a startup BeOpen:

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273876... (I watched this whole video, there's also a couple Lex Fridman videos)

At Google from 2005 to ~2014, Guido nominally had 50% of his time to work on CPython, but that's pretty fuzzy because he was really productive in any case. (I was his officemate for a couple years during that time.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

This reads a bit like a tautology..."Crystal has not taken off because Crystal has not taken off".

Crystal has been going on for years and there is still no major support, it won't change, basically if you're a new lanague you have a couple of years after that you just missed the train.

Not historically true. Python didn't take off for years after the initial release in 1991. Even in the mid 2000s people were evangelising Python like it was a new thing (https://xkcd.com/353/)

Or take Rust, which has gained adoption more recently. It took a while to get going after the 1.0 release in 2015. If you look at daily downloads of Rust crates (https://lib.rs/stats) as a proxy for adoption:

- 2015 to 2017 - not many downloads

- 2018 - first signs of real growth, reaches 1M per day.

- 2018 to 2021 - 10x growth, 10M per day

- 2021 to 2024 - 10x growth (projected)

So new languages shouldn't lose hope if they don't see adoption immediately. It's possible that they might be adopted later. But for language authors, it's the hope that kills you. You continue working on it even if maybe you shouldn't.

Another one: nix started in 2003 but hasn't really entered the common usage/popularity until the last 4 (or so) years as far as I can tell.

Define "shouldn't". Working on a language is a gift in itself.

Sure, let me define "shouldn't". For those authors who hope to see their language become mainstream and achieve widespread adoption, they may want to cut their losses. If they're working on it for intrinsic reward they should continue, by all means.

I'm not sure that I agree with the poster you are replying to, that Crystal won't take off, but I'm pretty sure that the statement "Crystal has not taken off because Crystal has not taken off" is kind of useful/valid/worthwhile. I believe that this is how network effects work.

I also am pretty sure I read about someone here on HN who used Crystal to build the code for their profitable cookie baking/selling business (the baked goods). I can't recall the details exactly. Edit: Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433847

No, its quite possible for a language to have strong backing before it takes off (C#, JavaScript, Go, Swift, Dart, Rust all did, to varying extents, from day one) and those tend to also be the langauges that take off quickly. Other languages struggle until they attract either a sufficient mass of distributed backing or the one key backer that gives it the level of support and visibility that supports the adoption curve taking off, and most never reach that point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com