After looking more into Crystal, it seems to try to be as Ruby-like as possible. I like Ruby, but I think its more involved features are syntactically complicated. I'm also just not a fan of the "everything is an object" mantra.

On the other hand, while Orange takes some syntax as Ruby, I'm trying to keep the syntax small and simple (similarly to C), and make sure that you could write programs for target platforms like the Arduino without needing a runtime.