A look at Crystal, a programming language for humans
I wish Crystal would take off. It has so many things going for it (many of them mentioned in the article): performance, useful tooling such as an opinionated formatter, an integrated RSpec-like test framework, a powerful standard library, an awesome type system that gets out of the way most of the time, a familiar syntax.<p>So far I have been building some smaller personal CLI tools and a few web apps (with the Lucky framework). I’ve also tinkered with running it in AWS lambda functions in a custom (albeit unfinished) runtime.<p>Coming from a decade of Ruby, due to the similar syntax and mindset Crystal is my go to for cases where I need performance or runtime-less execution (e.g. in containers from scratch that contain only the binary and dependencies, if needed).<p>Crystal's standard library provided enough functionality for me in the past to get away with only few dependencies per project, which is great for supply chain security and complexity. Some of it's highlights are:<p><pre><code>  - an ergonomic HTTP::Server and client
  - OAuth / OAuth2 clients with token refresh
  - JSON/YAML/XML parsing/generation/mapping
  - JSON/YAML mapping to classes
  - native templating similar to ERB</code></pre>