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Discussion on: We created the Crystal language, ask us anything!

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rapidnerd profile image
George

What was the biggest obstacle you had to overcome when creating Crystal?

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nditada profile image
Nico

Brian will post a technical perspective on this, but I wanted to offer a non-technical one. My perception of the team's biggest stumbling situations had to do with our own natural self-criticism. The classic mentality when tackling these sort of problems is "if this could be done, someone would have already done it". The easiest way to disarm those fears is to approach the problem with a humble but curious frame and to just follow the path to see where it leads.

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Brian J. Cardiff

When creating a new language you have tons of things to think about.
Knowing and being able to focusing on the right ones is the hardest I would say.

From "this feature would be so cool, I would love to use it" to "fix the stylesheet here or there" you have the whole spectrum of ideas, tasks and research. And sometimes the right ones are not the more entretaining ones :-)

A language is easier to toy around at the beginner and when the time goes by the decisions are sometimes harder because consensus is somewhat needed, compatibility is expected, etc.