I was wrong. I’ve never encountered it again. It was a great language, super productive. I helped some people develop a pet insurance service. So weird. I’d work with crystal again for sure.
To me it feels like it never quite reached maturity, although in a better world it would have gotten more support and conquered all territory that is now ruled by the Gophers.
I guess to make a successful programming language, you either need corporate backing or extend an existing one nowadays, otherwise it's really hard to build a stdlib of modern proportions.
It has been a while so I can’t recall very clearly, and I have a feeling the community and docs around it are all much better now.
it would surprise me if the stdlib was the issue. you can clone the ruby, python, or go standard libraries, and that would get you into a good state pretty fast; those languages have already done the work to assemble a standard library that people seem satisfied with by and large, and translating code into a new language is far easier than coming up with what should go into a library and then designing and implementing it from scratch. still takes time and effort but there's a clear roadmap if you go that route.
I suspect the real weakness is the thousands of third party packages for stuff that is too specialised or niche to be in the stdlib, but when you need it you really need it. (e.g. I have recently felt the need for an implementation of the blossom algorithm for graph matching in elixir; in python or ruby it's already done for me and available as a package)