@gigaa Thanks! I got back into it after the Jungle Inferno update.

@anw I totally was thinking of 한국어. 😅 I’ve been studying 한국어 for ~9 months now

@andrewzah That's cool! Are you using these books for learning?

@anw Nah, I just bought these ones: Korean Grammar in Use / Korean Grammar for International Learners.

I got Korean Grammar in Use for the TOPIK test. But until now, I only used howtostudykorean.com + talktomeinkorean.com. Also I lived in Korea for 8 months
https://niu.moe/media/0DDak4jQSbeLlFTs1QU

@circsarlatan I like Crystal for personal projects only atm. It hasn’t reached version 1 yet, and frameworks like Amber aren’t mature and tested yet.

Amaranth is my main project atm, which uses Crystal for the backend (Lexing / Parsing, Plugin Handling, a nice command DSL): https://github.com/azah/amaranth

I like it because it’s a statically compiled, strongly typed language so it makes me think hard about my data and structuring. And it has elegant syntax like Ruby.

@circsarlatan To clarify, I started out with Ruby (and Rails). So I'm gonna be biased but I think Ruby's style of syntax is really nice. I dislike Python's style.

Crystal has *almost* the same syntax but it's 1) safe, 2) compiled and 3) fast. Handling threads is nice as well, it uses CSP similar to Go. Crystal just gets a lot less press than #Rust.

Crystal's API documentation is phenomenal: https://crystal-lang.org/api/0.24.2/HTTP/WebSocket.html

So in general it's really pleasant to work with, fast, and not so verbose.

@andrewzah I actually used Ruby (and Rails) fairly significantly when creating a queuing system in a educational context. I could never really grok the language, too much magic I guess? Same goes for Python.

Did you also look at Elixir? That has *almost* the same syntax but as a functional language.

The documentation is why I'm currently looking at #Rust. Makes learning the language incredibly smooth.

@circsarlatan Yeah, Rails has a nasty problem of "Magic" things like ActiveRecord, etc, doing a lot of stuff under the hood.

What helped is watching a RailsConf talk about how things like ActiveRecord, etc, really work. After that it's not so bad, although I think Rails is overkill for a lot of applications. Sinatra + a basic ORM is pretty sufficient, but I digress.

I've looked at Phoenix/Elm/Elixir, and they look promising. Coming from Clojure I really like languages that make FP first class.

@andrewzah You came from Clojure? Then I have to ask: what made you 'leave' it? Haskell or Idris would probably fit your earlier criteria.

@circsarlatan Well, I started picking up Clojure for a few months. I really like it, but the errors you get are a nightmare to debug. So I just went back to Crystal.

I want to learn #Haskell at some point... I even have the http://haskellbook.com/ book.

@Wraptile Yep. PUBG/LoL/Overwatch were huge in most pc bangs. I only went to one pc bang that actually had TF2 available.

Busan is a big city but I think it's reasonable enough. Korea in general is a lot cheaper when it comes to food/eating out. Fresh fruits were more expensive though, compared to the US.

@andrewzah I was planning on staying in Busan for few months but it's quite a bit more expensive than SEA, like Thailand or Vietnam and without great weather or beaches :)
Nevertheless it's still on my bucket list, thanks for some input!