It's like someone took C, Python, and Perl, extracted the worst parts of all three and jammed them into one hellish language. There's not one thing about rust syntax that I enjoy. It's probably the worst out of any language I've tried, including Perl.

I would rather read someone else's Perl script than Rust.

It's very much one of these new-age languages that feel the need to reinvent every wheel and invent entirely new syntactical idioms just so they can be different.

And yeah, the "just use rust, pleb" attitude is also super offputting. I'm not interested in dealing with people like that when I'm learning a language. I have plenty of much, much less terrible options.

I can’t take anyone who says the syntax of Rust is worse than Perl.

What new syntactical idioms did Rust invent? It’s pretty plain and easy to read, anyone who has looked at C, C++, Python, C#, Java or anything modern will grok it pretty easily.

lifetimes, async, the myriads of pointer types, that poor-person's monad '?' for a single type.. Sure, you need to give the compiler a lot of hints to achieve what Rust is doing, but it does not look pretty or elegant.

Lifetimes are indeed unique, but hardly take up much syntactical space.

? operator is fine, especially if you’re used to JS or C#, and hardly take up much space.

Pointer types are what, & and * ? Fine if you’re coming from c, c++ and don’t take up much space.

.async is the weirdest for sure, but again hardly strange or disgusting.

What about any of this is worse than if I smashed my face into my keyboard but hit only the $*%#•¥$><~.,!=&@£.?!’ characters, aka writing Perl? Or anything as totally alien as Haskell?

Most Rust I read or write, if I squint, looks like Python with a few extra braces and semicolons.

I was thinking of things like Box, Rc, Arc, Cell, Refcell. Then there is also the macro language, which integrates Scheme concepts. Like C++, it is a huge language, with extra wrinkles for every new corner case. Again, maybe this all is unavoidable if one wants to have zero cost abstractions. Hopefully, language designers will learn from Rust and come up with something more elegant.

No disagreement about Perl's ugliness..

All of the types you mentioned are library constructs, not syntax.

Macros are syntax though.

I might have mis-interpreted this statement: "Certain types and traits that exist in the standard library are known to the Rust compiler." (https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/special-types-and-traits...")

Out of those, Box is the only one that is, and the way that it is is not syntax: it has one exception, and that’s that you can move the contents out of it via a dereference. That’s making existing syntax semantically valid, not introducing new syntax.

In terms of syntax, you create a box with Box::new just like you might any other struct.

EDIT: anyway I'm not saying that means that your underlying issue isn't real, just that I think describing it as "syntax" makes the issue confusing to understand. It sounds to me like maybe you think Rust programs are too verbose?

Lifetimes aren’t even unique: they come from ocaml, where they’re used for generic types. Lifetimes are also generic types in Rust.

Could you give any examples of syntax you've hit that didn't make sense or seemed awful?

Sure, "let foo = bar" is one of the worst things any language can do.

Let is redundant, that's what the = is for. Unless it's meant to be equivalent to 'var' or 'auto', in which case it's even worse.

Let contains no information, it's pointless clutter that replaced something that did contain vital information. Let tells you the next symbol is a variable. What type? Who knows and who cares, it's a variable, deal with it. C marks a symbol as a variable by using its type name.

I mean, this was a very large part of why Perl is so miserable. I will never understand why people choose to implement this in modern languages.

Anyway, variables and parameters without explicit, visible type information is a hard no for me. I took a sniff of a couple rust projects, saw this mess, and decided that rust is not for me. I don't care about all the other magical benefits that cure all my ails, this feature is a dealbreaker, full stop.

`let` defines a new binding, as opposed to changing the value of an existing binding. You can't remove `let` to keep only `=` because it has a different use case.

Not indicating the type is idiomatic in Rust, but you can annotate it:

    let commit_message: String = repo.head().peel_to_commit().ok()?.message()?.into();

Here this is useful to specify the type `into` should convert to. However, if rewritten as:

    let commit_message = repo.head().peel_to_commit().ok()?.message()?.to_string();

Then it is useless because we're already specifying the type of the variable by using `to_string`.

Note that IDEs are displaying type hints anyway (without you having to type them), so you don't have to suffer if walking through a codebase where people are annotating their types too little for comfort

"Ugly syntax" seems like a weird kneejerk reaction. It's text on a screen, if you look at it enough it'll seem normal.

This seems like a meaningless trivialization, because you completely remove the meaning and purpose of the thing. All the code you write gets converted into machine code. Why not write machine code then? If you write it long enough it'll seem normal.