Some of my complaints are petty, and I think can be dismissed as just personal preference. I don't have a great deal of complaint with languages with different syntax, just ones that are so intentionally cryptic so as to invent needless specific sigils that you need to memorize.
I agree that most of the awkwardness of reading comes from explicit declarations, but really, even if it's more verbose, I would prefer that that explicit nature is defined elsewhere rather than reading like a compact run-on sentence. (I'm hypocritically writing here, since I do this too often myself.)
> just ones that are so intentionally cryptic so as to invent needless specific sigils that you need to memorize.
Can you back up this claim that the language is intentionally cryptic?
Ignoring that: other languages have sigils (Perl's @, $, %, etc.; PHP has always used $; Java uses @ annotations, and so on) or their own quirky syntax (C#'s custom attributes before a class, Python's @ decorators, etc.). What is it about Rust that is particularly confusing?
As in the prior comment, I'm a relative novice myself and certainly never achieved that moment with Rust where the code kind of melts away and you just see raw intent ("blonde, blunette, redhead"), but I do wonder if languages like Python have set our expectations a bit unrealistically in regards to that. Like instead of prioritizing information density, explicitness, and clarity, we got excited about the quick rush that came with `import antigravity`.
Java and C++ aren't just verbose, there's a lot of redundancy there, at least classically. Stuff that is needlessly repeated between headers and implementation, cases where you're having to hold the compiler's hand and continually repeat information that it should be able to infer itself from the code. And then the moment you find auto or template inference and feel like you can finally trust the compiler to do the right thing, it barfs up half a page of inscrutable errors and you're back to babying it.
Rust—in my limited exposure—is hitting kind of a sweet spot where it's the expressiveness and build/package ecosystem of Python, the performance and precision of C++, and the density of Perl. Or at least that's what's being aimed for; but obviously these goals open it up to charges that it's actually just as unreadable as Perl or as verbose as C++.
I agree that most of the awkwardness of reading comes from explicit declarations, but really, even if it's more verbose, I would prefer that that explicit nature is defined elsewhere rather than reading like a compact run-on sentence. (I'm hypocritically writing here, since I do this too often myself.)