I strongly disagree. The message passing semantics are a pretty core part of why you can write pretty complex metaprogramming in Ruby and, without writing a lot of code, make a lot of stuff happen. And even somebody who "doesn't care" about that is critically indebted to it--because that's how Rails happens.
This is not always for the best, of course, but I reach for Ruby pretty consistently when I need to do that sort of thing--often in a dynamic programming context or where I'm binding a lot of state to present a straightforward DSL to an end user (which Sorbet helps with quite a lot, too). Sometimes, for practical reasons, I'll do that sort of work in TypeScript, but the result usually has a lot more sandpaper to it.
Crystal...just isn't that. At all. It's a fine language for what it is; it doesn't just offer anything that Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, and Rust don't, so I have no use for it. But it's definitely not Ruby and it doesn't even smell like Ruby.
This is not always for the best, of course, but I reach for Ruby pretty consistently when I need to do that sort of thing--often in a dynamic programming context or where I'm binding a lot of state to present a straightforward DSL to an end user (which Sorbet helps with quite a lot, too). Sometimes, for practical reasons, I'll do that sort of work in TypeScript, but the result usually has a lot more sandpaper to it.
Crystal...just isn't that. At all. It's a fine language for what it is; it doesn't just offer anything that Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, and Rust don't, so I have no use for it. But it's definitely not Ruby and it doesn't even smell like Ruby.