372: Crystal Clear

We're back and going crazy about Crystal, a statically typed language that's as fast as C and as slick as ruby.

Plus an update on Rails 6, Intel's growing adoption of Rust, and the challenge of making breaking changes.

Links:

• Feedback: Academia and Industry — Do either of you have any insights as to how the software development community would view someone with a math PhD, but no industry coding experience as a job applicant? Any advice would be appreciated.
• Feedback: Absurd Abstractions — FYI about wanting `interface` in Python: they are called abstract base classes. Check out the standard library module, abc for that and collections.abc some useful predefined container interfaces.
• Feedback: Breaking Changes — I developed  a niche Python package that has some user following in the network security realm.  I’m at a crossroads though as a change I want to make will subtly break scripts that worked in previous/current versions.  The end result of my pending change  is good for the project but I fear I’ll ruin the workflow of my users.  Other than my github page I don’t know how to query/inform my users of this pending change.  What should I do?
• Ruby on Rails 6.0 Release Notes — Make Webpacker the default JavaScript compiler for Rails 6
• Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming: Josh Triplett — Hear about how Intel is working to bring Rust to full parity with C, building the future of systems programming.
• Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It | WIRED — The original well-meaning, geeky architects of the web believed that there was an abundance of altruism in human nature—and they were more correct on this count, it turns out, than many esteemed social philosophers were. But they were too optimistic in overlooking the possibility that corporations would exploit and colonize this new realm. If only we had all seen it coming.
• The Crystal Programming Language — Crystal is statically type checked, so any type errors will be caught early by the compiler rather than fail on runtime. Moreover, and to keep the language clean, Crystal has built-in type inference, so most type annotations are unneeded.
• The Imposter's Handbook by Rob Conery — You've had to learn on the job. New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.