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I think a lot of people would disagree with #1. There was a discussion on /r/technology yesterday where people were discussing how it was exactly the other way

I think a lot of people would disagree with #1. There was a discussion on /r/technology yesterday where people were discussing how it was exactly the other way round – Ada has weird syntax (so many English words!) which slows adoption, and Rust is C-like enough that the target market of C/C++ users can pick it up, syntactically at least. I'm saying this having done a distributed systems course in Ada. It felt like writing a novel, about some very awkward people announcing every action as they did it. Rust, on the other hand, feels like pair programming with a wizard (the compiler) who knows how to write really great C++ and has many tips to share. Rust's syntax is, like many new languages as they are invented, essentially a pick of the crop of the best syntax ideas from other languages. 'Best' is probably debatable but familiarity is certainly not. Type annotations are basically Scala syntax. Class::method(), ditching `return` in favour of last-line expressions and the || {} closure syntax are all pretty close to Ruby. Structs/enums are also basically Scala. `instance.method()`, and pretty much the rest of the language, is universal. It's true, Scala syntax for types is the weirdest part, but once you know what it means it's not hard to decipher. Much easier than trying to figure out function pointers in C, if you ask me. #2 is probably true, but that's the cost of staying close to the metal. Rust makes all your memory access very explicit, rather than bundling it up in the standard/GC or leaving it to you. But it's a model you can get used to, and it has value as a mental model aside from its application in Rust. #3 – well. Ada was young once. Rust is incredibly stable for a project designed by a distributed community of Mozilla and a ton of volunteers.

johncolanduoni 10y ago
> Structs/enums are also basically Scala. How so? Scala class bodies are a mix of ordered constructor statements and unordered declarations/method definitions, while Rust structs can only declare fields (without any sort of initial value). Scala enumerations (both scala.Enumeration and the more common sealed class versions) look nothing like a Rust enum; if anything Rust enums look like ML/Haskell algebraic type definitions. > It's true, Scala syntax for types is the weirdest part, but once you know what it means it's not hard to decipher. The part of the type syntax that is like Scala (i.e. the colons and arrows) has its origins in the ML family IIRC. Rust's bootstrapping compiler was written in OCaml, so I suspect that was in fact the inspiration.
- cormacrelf 10y ago
  Ah, I see it's been a while since I've used Scala. I think I should have referred to case classes. Weak point nonetheless. I did fail to mention the other very Scala thing: match expressions. Most complicated Rust match expressions could almost compile without errors in Scala.

johncolanduoni 10y ago

> Structs/enums are also basically Scala. How so? Scala class bodies are a mix of ordered constructor statements and unordered declarations/method definitions, while Rust structs can only declare fields (without any sort of initial value). Scala enumerations (both scala.Enumeration and the more common sealed class versions) look nothing like a Rust enum; if anything Rust enums look like ML/Haskell algebraic type definitions. > It's true, Scala syntax for types is the weirdest part, but once you know what it means it's not hard to decipher. The part of the type syntax that is like Scala (i.e. the colons and arrows) has its origins in the ML family IIRC. Rust's bootstrapping compiler was written in OCaml, so I suspect that was in fact the inspiration.

cormacrelf 10y ago
Ah, I see it's been a while since I've used Scala. I think I should have referred to case classes. Weak point nonetheless. I did fail to mention the other very Scala thing: match expressions. Most complicated Rust match expressions could almost compile without errors in Scala.