[vidarh]

As a Ruby dev, that Crystal is "close but different" means I know I won't be able to use my Ruby code but at the same time I get too little in return to make it feel worthwhile.

For the very rare circumstances where Ruby is too slow for what I need to do, there's usually code in some other language I can wrap in an extension, and that code is far more likely to be C or some other more established language than Crystal.

[npn]

To me Crystal is actually a more polished Ruby implementation. There was some annoying inconsistent in ruby stdlib that was corrected in Crystal, for example the modules for file/directory interaction.

Ruby was my main language for scripting, but I switched to Crystal completely after getting comfortable with it. Now it is really hard to switch back to Ruby.

Also, I thing compiled language is the greatest friend for older programmers. Over the time I'm getting more and more sloppy and very often make some typing error. Crystal being compiled language saved me countless time by refusing to compile when I made the mistake. Meanwhile in Ruby it can only be found after the script ran for a while, sometime it became a disaster because the action was destructive.

[vidarh]

The thing is, any annoyance in the stdlib you can paper over with gems if you want, and still be able to keep using all the libraries out there.

As for the type checking, Ruby is getting more and more opt in type checking, so that reason is slowly diminishing as well.