A lot of the syntax was borrowed from C++ for better or worse. It does make the transition from C++ a lot easier but of course if you're not familiar with the l

A lot of the syntax was borrowed from C++ for better or worse. It does make the transition from C++ a lot easier but of course if you're not familiar with the language there'll be some friction. Beyond that there are things that Rust needs syntax for that simply doesn't exist in many other languages such as the Trait-based generics, modules (that didn't use to exist in C++) and of course lifetimes. Beyond that I can't help but feeling that you're following this (IMO) counterproductive cargo cult that holds that sigils are teh 3v1l and everything should be alphanumeric only. Python was at the forefront of this movement but it's now very popular. IMO it's completely counterproductive, even in Python case. It's form over function. You end up with a language where you have to be careful when you refactor because indentation becomes significant and no way to scope your variables properly. Or a language like JS where somebody genuinely thought that having arcane rules to automatically insert semicolons was a reasonable idea because "ewwww semicolons look ugly". It sure looks good if you want to get them tatooed, but in practice at best it's pointless and at worst it gets in the way. I'm all for descriptive variable and function names but the core syntax of the language is repeated all over the place all the time and benefits from concision. Having Rust spell out "function" instead of "fn" wouldn't disambiguate anything since you're exposed to it within 5 minutes in the language and you'll be super familiar with it very quickly. Having a shorthand means that it doesn't pollute the code listing and leaves more room for the actually important stuff. A lot of people like to point out Perl as an example of "sigil soup gone wrong" but I'd argue that it's not even the real problem here, Perl can become an unreadable mess because of all the "magic" it allows, meaning you can write code that seems to do absolutely nothing but actually does a whole lot (with things like the implied variable $_ for instance). If you look at an exhaustive list of Perl operators there are only a handful I'd personally consider questionable (like `x` and maybe `<=>`. Also some of the quoting q{} qq{} and qx{} are really obtuse).