I've used perl5 for a long time (although these days I've replaced it with python in my toolchain, although I have my fair share of complaints about python as w

I've used perl5 for a long time (although these days I've replaced it with python in my toolchain, although I have my fair share of complaints about python as well) and I think your comparison is unfair. Rust's sometimes complicated syntax is made necessary by the very concept of the language. You need to be able to express lifetimes, you need to be able to express generics, you need to be able to strongly type lambdas etc... Of course the syntax is going to be a bit more complicated than, say, Common Lisp where everything is dynamic and garbage collected and you can let the runtime figure things out. Perl 5 was syntactically insane because that's how the authors decided to do it. Effectively it didn't let you express things that were impossible in Lisp, Python, Ruby or JS. It's just a design choice to lean heavily on sigils and magic variables to favor short code even if it can be cryptic to people not intimately familiar with the language. I doubt anybody who hasn't used perl before will be able to figure out exactly what this does (and I'd argue that it's a fairly simple and idiomatic script, not some heinously cryptic code golf): while (<>) { chomp(); s/f.o/bar/; print; } Rust is noisy because it has to represent concepts that simply don't exist in other programming languages. I'd go even further: Rust does a better job than most languages at letting you only explicitly mention things that need to be explicitly mentioned. Thanks to the very powerful type inference you can write very tidy code, IMO much more so than in C where I have to explicitly type every intermediary variable that I would use for instance.