> To be honest, everything in Rust looks a bit ugly to me. I write a lot of Rust code at work, and I admit that it can sometimes be pretty noisy. There are sev

> To be honest, everything in Rust looks a bit ugly to me. I write a lot of Rust code at work, and I admit that it can sometimes be pretty noisy. There are several major contributors to this: 1. Rust offers fine-grained control over pass-by-value, pass-by-reference, and pass-by-mutable reference. This is great for performance. But it also adds a lot of "&" and "&mut" and "x.to_owned()" clutter everywhere. 2. Rust provides support for generics (aka parameterized types). Once again, this is great for performance, and it also allows better compile-time error detection. But again, you wind up adding a lot of "<T>" and "where T:" clutter everywhere. 3. Usually, Rust can automatically infer lifetimes. But every once in a while, you want to do something messy, and you end up needing to write out the lifetimes manually. This is when you end up seeing weird things like "'a". But in my experience, this is pretty rare unless I'm doing something hairy. And if I'm doing something hairy, I'm just as happy to have more explicit documentation in the source code. Really, the underlying problem here is that (a) Rust fills the same high-control, high-performance niche as C++, but (b) Rust prefers explicit control where C++ sometimes offers magic, invisible conversions. (Yes, I declare all my C++ constructors "explicit" and avoid conversion operators.) Syntax is a hard problem, and I've struggled to get syntax right for even tiny languages. But syntax for languages with low-level control is an even harder problem. At some point, you just need to make a decision and get used to it. In practice, I really enjoy writing Rust. It's definitely not as simple as Ruby, Python or Go. But it fills a very different ecological niche, with finer-grained control over memory representations, and support for generics.