Because it's a much saner, coherent, and easier to use language with less footguns...
Now, why not Crystal over C++? Because it's way less mature, with way less documentation, way less resources, way worse tooling, way less libraries, way more implementation bugs, and, if we're realistic, it might never go anywhere...
> Because it's a much saner, coherent, and easier to use language with less footguns...
Which for parallelism probably switches the question to “why Crystal over Pony”, since Crystal seems to preserve the key C++ footguns specifically linked to parallelism.
Languages of the quality of Smalltalk, and Ada, and Dylan, and Self, and CL have vanquished in the margins, and e.g. even something as celebrated as Haskell does hardly better in the industry (some financial companies, this or that project, and so on), so the chances of a new language like Crystal are slim to begin with...
Oh yes, been there, done that, created proglangs, and they certainly did not get anywhere. But I feel Crystal has already gained such momentum that it indeed will get somewhere, it’s beyond that phase "to begin with." After all, if any language can get anywhere, why not Crystal?
>But I feel Crystal has already gained such momentum that it indeed will get somewhere, it’s beyond that phase "to begin with."
Let's hope so, but I fear that's wishful thinking. What proof do we have of that?
It's not used anywhere important ("killer app"), barely makes the rest of the TIOBE index, along with staples like NATURAL, Alice, BBC Basic, Euphoria, Factor, Forth, and Icon, and has no major force like Google or Mozilla backing it.
It's only us here in HN who keep hearing about it.
Julia has had tons more publicity (even from some major outlets), and it's still going nowhere fast.
> It's only us here in HN who keep hearing about it.
Don't you think us here at HN include quite a number of people standing centrally when it comes to "anywhere" in the tech industry? This is what I mean, when talking about "us as a community." Of course this does not go for everyone... but for a considerable amount, I'd say. (Myself am certainly not one of them.)
> Julia has had tons more publicity (even from some major outlets), and it's still going nowhere fast.
Well, Julia being made for extensive numerical computations and the like, I think it is doing very well, esp. in academical use, which is somewhere it's right at home. If not yet very much in use yet, at least many academics in relevant fields--which frankly are quite a lot days--have heard of the language. If Julia holds enough of its' promises, I don't see why they wouldn't migrate eventually, given time.
I don't see how any lang could get anywhere "fast," no matter how superb it'd be, "anywhere" tends to be sceptical of change if they're fine with what they have.
Now, why not Crystal over C++? Because it's way less mature, with way less documentation, way less resources, way worse tooling, way less libraries, way more implementation bugs, and, if we're realistic, it might never go anywhere...