
Journey from Node to Crystal - faaq
https://www.duodesign.co.uk/blog/from-node-to-crystal/
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cris-ward
I wrote the article, happy to answer any questions.

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bararchy
Thanks for sharing, It's interesting to hear how was the acceptance of other
team members to the project moving into a different language ?

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cris-ward
Getting acceptance was much easier than I expected. We used coffee-script a
lot before which has a bit of an overlap with Ruby/Crystal, which helped.

We've since moved to using typescript on the front-end and crystal on the back
end and both type systems have a lot of similarities. They both also help
catch many more errors earlier which gives us a lot more confidence in our
code and simplifies the scope of tests which are needed. You can get to a
point with a javascript application when you feel you'll create a new bug just
by looking at the wrong way.

Crystal as a languages feels really cool. It's very low on boiler plate, which
makes it really easy to read and doesn't take a lot of explaining. It takes
the best bits of Ruby, so has a easy to follow logic which allows you to
understand how everything hangs together. There is also very easy to get
hypnotised by the 3ms response times when you're running it locally.

I'd say the only down points at the moment is the size of the community. The
lack of 3rd party libraries and inability to 'google for a solution' could be
an issue. However crystal's community makes up for in energy what it lacks in
size, the gitter room is very active - [https://gitter.im/crystal-
lang/crystal](https://gitter.im/crystal-lang/crystal)

Web dev is not the most complex of programming tasks and our team is small, so
your mileage may vary, but so far so good.

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totakaro
Great experience, Thanks for sharing!

