couldn’t agree more. I’ve been thinking a bit about rust recently and why it’s hard to write when starting out, and I think needlessly verbose syntax is about 1

couldn’t agree more. I’ve been thinking a bit about rust recently and why it’s hard to write when starting out, and I think needlessly verbose syntax is about 10% of the problem and not enough syntax around borrowing/the memory model is 90% of the problem. In other words, Rust syntax is minimalist in all the wrong places. A lot of borrow checking related stuff in rust forces you (until you internalize how it works) into a check/compile-fix loop that is horribly inefficient and tedious. if performing moves had special syntax it’d be palpably obvious to even new rust programmers that a move is happening and that assignment does not work as it does in about 99% of other programming languages (in most cases). also important things that then invert or alter this behavior should also have special syntax. for example, I’m still not sure how any client code is supposed to know that some library type implements Copy (which complicates things further by inverting rusts inversion of typical semantics). seems like the only way is “try it and see” or read the docs. I guess the idea is that you shouldn’t necessarily need to know this, but I do think rust would have benefited from making borrow and memory handling more transparent and obvious with special syntax around it (beyond lifetimes, at point of use, not just in signatures). As it stands it seems to want to give users the control that comes with manual memory management with the sort of “hiding away” of details that GCs traditionally afford