I definitely wanted .NET assembly. F# for .NET was also a maybe as that's where |> was introduced before Elixir popularized it. And there were a few .NET-based small languages. None of that happened for technical reasons.
Piet looks fun, but I don't think I could a post write about it, it would probably require a lot of images with annotations on them, much more work than a day.
Overall I was especially interested in esoteric languages with unusual computation model (AsciiDots, Whenever, Thue), not just unusual looks (Rockstar, Chef, LOLPython etc.)
If Hashnode is not serving you well, this series is double-posted to dev.to as well.
I don't think Ruby gems would just work in Crystal. It looks very similar, but everything except maybe some really trivial ones would take some adjustment.
Thanks for this series, I have enjoyed it. I had some questions regarding your process, but you've basically responded to all of them in this post.
I have also enjoyed the acerbic tone of some of the articles. Did it seem over-the-top at times? Who cares! As we say around here - a good hate is never bad. 😁
I wondered whether you'd get to .NET or LINQ. Well, maybe in the next one. 😁
Also, two interesting esolangs in case you or someone else reading this don't know them are Piet, which is basically a 2D language with pixels, and Rockstar, which makes programs sound like metal songs. Dylan Beattie, the author of Rockstar, has a fun talk where he talks about both here: youtube.com/watch . He also talks about other things - it's a really good talk.