zlacker

Ruby is still very popular, and Crystal's syntax is heavily inspired (i.e. very familiar) by Ruby. This is similar to Julia's approach of making the language syntactically familiar with MATLAB.

If a bunch of startups continue to love Ruby's initial expressiveness and productivity (early code write & read cycles), then unless Ruby improves on similar dimensions then Crystal adoption may pick up.

Of course, Crystal's adoption could be stopped if Ruby (and Rails) improves on the dimensions that Bruce Perens mentioned in his video; namely correctness, reliability and efficiency. Supposedly, Crystal is supposed to be faster, more reliable and just-as-efficient-to-write given the syntactic similarities that many developers love about Ruby.