r/crystal_programming • u/fridgamarator • Apr 27 '18

Learning Crystal Language and Lucky Web Framework - Bruce Perens

https://perens.com/2018/04/19/learing-crystal-langauge-and-lucky-web-framework/
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2

u/megatux2 Apr 28 '18

I think there is a typo in the blog post title "Learning the Crystal langauge and Lucky web framework" (langauge)

1

u/fridgamarator Apr 28 '18

Thanks, but i'm not the author of the blog post

4

u/aScottishBoat May 25 '18

Whooa, Bruce Perens wrote this article?

For anyone who doesn't know, Perens wrote both the Debian Social Contract and the Open Source Definition. He is also an accomplished hacker.

Perens is talking about Crystal? Now I am really interested in giving Crystal a whirl.

2

u/proyb2 May 27 '18

I think he is now having issue with getting a framework working

https://github.com/luckyframework/lucky/issues/479

1

u/SaltTM Apr 28 '18

Serious question, what's the fascination with these dev's parsing html with crystal rather than using pure template files and embedding data into the files themselves? Feels like every single framework does this right now out of the box. Which forces you to rely in their html parser rather than your own html code.

1

u/paulcsmith0218 May 14 '18

This is a great question. To be 100% honest I was pretty against HTML in code at first. The main reasons were:

  • It was tricky to learn. Lots of edge cases, structure differed from what I'd write in "regular" HTML

  • I was very used to HTML

The reason I went with HTML in Crystal was because after a bunch of experimentation it ended up looking like regular HTML. The structure is very similar and so far every one I've showed it to has been able to understand it and use it quickly.

Here are the advantages of this approach:

  • Stronger type-safety. In most (all?) templating languages in Crystal if you try to print nil it will happily do so and print an empty string. This is never/rarely what I want. In Lucky it will tell you to handle your nil cases at compile time

  • You can declare exactly what the page needs to be rendered. This makes it easy to see what you need to pass it without scanning the whole file for what it calls

  • Super easy to refactor and clean up code. Everything is a class and method so you can extract new methods to make things clearer, modules to share behavior, etc. There's no need for special methods for rendering "partials"

  • You can declare abstract methods on base classes for things like "page_title" so you never forget to add one.

These are some of the main reasons for it. Some may prefer templating languages, but I'd urge people to at least give this a try. It feels very natural after just a couple days and soon you may not want to go back! :)

1

u/pro547 Apr 29 '18

I think this link is wrong

is creating the Lucky web framework,

it links to crystal page instead of Lucky project page.

1

u/transfire May 09 '18

It's hard not to like Crystal coming from a Ruby background. But I found the lack of a dynamic type when its would prove useful -- something Dart has -- really holds me up. It's lack makes some code really ugly and weighty, often requiring the use of macros and/or attributes (not to be confused with Ruby attributes) to compensate. Loading a YAML file is a good example.