I think language-to-language comparisons are often "unfair". Comparing Ruby and Crystal is probably not much better than comparing Ruby to C. Syntax is not an a

I think language-to-language comparisons are often "unfair". Comparing Ruby and Crystal is probably not much better than comparing Ruby to C. Syntax is not an absolute signal for language similarity, and the most important parts of Ruby (in my opinion) more or less require it to be interpreted and not compiled. One can always make languages look the same (which Facebook did with OCaml <-> JS transpiler) without the languages being similar by other measures. tl;dr "yes, that one is faster and looks similar to the other one so our developers will be less scared and this is good" is important and valid but "that one is just the fast language but slower" is not a valid comparison, which I'm kind of getting.