Being easy to use for people who don't want to learn new things is not a good driver for language design unless the primary motivation for the language's develo

Being easy to use for people who don't want to learn new things is not a good driver for language design unless the primary motivation for the language's development is education. If you want to use C or C++, use them. Rust is its own thing and it will either succeed or fail to break into the mainstream but I can tell you that if it was just C or C++ with lifetime stuff bolted on then I would never have bothered learning it. Criticizing it because C/C++ programmers can't just drop into it and start productively writing production-quality code is very short-sighted, IMO, and it's amazing how much it happens around here.