ludwig-crystal

This was an experimental app to try and learn some Crystal and Amber, to see if they're something I would want to start using. I've determined that while they're both interesting and impressive, they're not quite there in terms of productivity and user friendliness. Which is totally understandable, given how young they both are, and the fact that they've been built almost entirely using the free time of their contributors!

Main problems:

• All of the understandable problems you would see with a pre 1.0 language and framework. (Bugs, lack of libraries, less online help and support.)
• Some slightly odd decisions with Amber (e.g., the controller param validations)
• The built-in Crystal spec framework leaves something to be desired
• The compile times on Crystal are awfully slow, which impacts development speed. After reading a bunch of discussion on the topic, it's really unkown whether that will improve in the future, and it doesn't seem like a top priority for the Crystal team.
• The development tools aren't really there yet. Editor integration is shaky at best, and the debugging experience is not good yet.

None of which is meant to put down any of the Crystal or Amber contributors, because they've done (and are doing) amazing work. I love the ideas of Crystal, and will probably continue to use it for small scripts and stuff, but for now I know I can be much more effective with other languages and frameworks for web development.