[Crystal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_%28programming_language%29) has gotten a highly distinguished mention in [this month's update summary](https://archive.is/ZkkgZ#selection-691.431-691.520) of the prestigious [TIOBE prog lang popularity index](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/):
> The top programming languages are in a long term decline: both Java and C > have all time low scores in the TIOBE index. And almost all of the other top > 10 languages are going down as well year to year. > > So what languages are taking advantage of this? It is all happening down in > the charts around position 40. A **new set of languages is gaining ground, > notably Crystal (#32)**, Kotlin (#41), Clojure (#42), Hack (#43) and Julia > (#46). > > **Especially Crystal with its jump from position 60 to 32 in one month is > doing very well.** The Crystal programming language is a statically typed > Ruby variant. Since it is compiled it is superfast and has a small memory > footprint without losing the feeling of being easy to use. It seems > worthwhile to give it a try. This is very impressive, given that Crystal is a 3-year-old newcomer that we've watched take its first steps, while Nim is still fighting its way into the top 100... Perhaps the most important thing that "Nim can learn from Crystal" (referencing my thread title) is how to quickly attract a fan-base. Crystal appealed to the base of millions of Ruby programmers by being much closer to it than Nim is to any existing language. (Crystal is still slightly behind D, Nim's closest competitor with a copyfree license, which also rose by appealing to a specific base of C++ devs.) Promoting Nim to Python programmers [(ex)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/6gwv4a/a_glance_at_the_pythonlookalike_nim_programming/), on the other hand, has been a lot more difficult... I still think that Nim has a lot of potential for mainstream popularity, but the problem is that most programmers out there don't instantly like its syntax. Having multiple [syntax skins / compiler front-ends](https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/2811) could widely broaden Nim's appeal. It would be like having several languages that share the same AST, compiler back-end, module ecosystem, etc.
