I hadn't. It's a great peice though. The rust programmer who adds and removes `&` and `ref` blindly is in phase 1, the part I'm claiming to like is more or less

I hadn't. It's a great peice though. The rust programmer who adds and removes `&` and `ref` blindly is in phase 1, the part I'm claiming to like is more or less phase 2, where some real thought goes into it, "here I have a &Option, so here it must be &Some(...)" and so on. Phase three is practical, much like how I might tell someone in casual conversation that something took orders of magnitude more time, without worrying too much about what magnitude I'm really talking about. This can give you the head space to tackle "real problems". As rust matures (and its users with it) I can understand the desire for these conveniences. I do feel the language loses some of its educational prowess. I'm always arguing in favor of more Racket like ideas, but the whole family of languages thing helps in this regard, but makes for quickly divergent communities. </ramble>