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This is a matter of familiarity. For example, Golang is claimed to have simple syntax, but I find Golang's syntax much harder to read than Rust. The fact they a

This is a matter of familiarity. For example, Golang is claimed to have simple syntax, but I find Golang's syntax much harder to read than Rust. The fact they avoided keywords and symbols like a plague caused that now e.g. function signatures are mostly names, spaces and parentheses, and the meaning of them depends on their relative positions, which is something I'm not used to. I guess if I wrote / read Golang sources more frequently, that would become a second nature and would not slow me down.

crispinb 3y ago
> This is a matter of familiarity No it is not. Or at least not for everyone. I have learned several languages more unfamiliar to me than Rust (pure functional, logic, stack-oriented,etc), but none has given me the difficulties Rust has. Also (only my sample of course, but there are no reliable stats) no-one I personally know who has gone through the Rust book has continued with Rust. The Rust Foundation hasn't made 'flattening the learning curve' one of its 2024 goals because people don't find Rust harder than other languages. Many just do. A false universal doesn't become true through brute repetition.
- zkldi 3y ago
  can i ask what kind of things you specifically found confusing about the syntax?
  - crispinb 3y ago
    I don't have a problem with Rust syntax. Actually I can't imagine any developer with more than a year or two's experience has much trouble with any language syntax (unless it's something truly weird like APL). After a few days use you barely notice surface details anyway - it's just one possible representation of an AST. My problem with using Rust is the way its complexity creeps into everything. There are large numbers of stdlib utility traits whose idiomatic use you have to remember to read almost any real world code. There's hardly a Rust library in common use that isn't a huge sprawling mass of over abstracted generics and macros. Even command line parsing is made to be a vastly complex endeavour. There are admittedly sugary niceties (eg derive attributes) that can make use of many of these libraries tractable for easy cases. But overall any substantial Rust program makes cognitive and memory demands on the programmer far in excess of what most languages require for the equivalent in my experience.
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      I can agree with that, I don't like overly abstract stuff either. That said in my projects I'm in control of the code and so I tend to avoid traits where they're not really necessary, I find Rust very pleasant to use that way and the compiler messages are simply outstanding. Often lifetime annotations can be replaced with heap allocations, which isn't always that efficient but it's a damn fast language and often you're not even going to measure a difference. > Even command line parsing is made to be a vastly complex endeavour. Yes, I even wrote a library for that once but then realized it only complicates everything and adds limitations. Nowadays I just do that by hand. For one it's guaranteed to be shorter than any parsing library, but also it's a good opportunity to think about what kind of arguments I need and in which form. And copy-pasting the parser from the previous project and adapting it is quick & easy.
      - crispinb 3y ago
        Sure, despite my frustrations with it (and with the often frankly false claims about it tirelessly repeated by people who identify too strongly with it - it's a programming language, not a signed-in-blood manifesto for world peace and ubiquitous sex), I'm actually still quite engaged in using and learning Rust. It's even my main language for my own projects right now (I no longer work in tech/dev). Some of that is just stubbornness (because I find it hard), but some practical (performance, WASMability etc). I do like the way the type system makes it seem like things snick precisely into place when you get things right. My beef (such as it is) is that I doubt I will ever get to the level of fluency where I 'just code' with it, rather than intermittent stripes of coding & fuming. It takes me probably 4x as long to do anything compared to any other language I've used (and although I'm not a talented programmer, I am a polyglot). Oddly on the cli parsing thing, I did end up finding a library I like - bpaf. It's kind of abstract but seems more conceptually principled than the near-universal clap. The kind of abstraction where once you have grasped a small set of orthogonal concepts, you can just combine them at will, seems OK to me. As contrasted with the type which has dozens of small rules, and special cases that rely heavily on (human) memory and/or constant doc lookups.
        3y ago

crispinb 3y ago

> This is a matter of familiarity No it is not. Or at least not for everyone. I have learned several languages more unfamiliar to me than Rust (pure functional, logic, stack-oriented,etc), but none has given me the difficulties Rust has. Also (only my sample of course, but there are no reliable stats) no-one I personally know who has gone through the Rust book has continued with Rust. The Rust Foundation hasn't made 'flattening the learning curve' one of its 2024 goals because people don't find Rust harder than other languages. Many just do. A false universal doesn't become true through brute repetition.

zkldi 3y ago
can i ask what kind of things you specifically found confusing about the syntax?
- crispinb 3y ago
  I don't have a problem with Rust syntax. Actually I can't imagine any developer with more than a year or two's experience has much trouble with any language syntax (unless it's something truly weird like APL). After a few days use you barely notice surface details anyway - it's just one possible representation of an AST. My problem with using Rust is the way its complexity creeps into everything. There are large numbers of stdlib utility traits whose idiomatic use you have to remember to read almost any real world code. There's hardly a Rust library in common use that isn't a huge sprawling mass of over abstracted generics and macros. Even command line parsing is made to be a vastly complex endeavour. There are admittedly sugary niceties (eg derive attributes) that can make use of many of these libraries tractable for easy cases. But overall any substantial Rust program makes cognitive and memory demands on the programmer far in excess of what most languages require for the equivalent in my experience.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    I can agree with that, I don't like overly abstract stuff either. That said in my projects I'm in control of the code and so I tend to avoid traits where they're not really necessary, I find Rust very pleasant to use that way and the compiler messages are simply outstanding. Often lifetime annotations can be replaced with heap allocations, which isn't always that efficient but it's a damn fast language and often you're not even going to measure a difference. > Even command line parsing is made to be a vastly complex endeavour. Yes, I even wrote a library for that once but then realized it only complicates everything and adds limitations. Nowadays I just do that by hand. For one it's guaranteed to be shorter than any parsing library, but also it's a good opportunity to think about what kind of arguments I need and in which form. And copy-pasting the parser from the previous project and adapting it is quick & easy.
    - crispinb 3y ago
      Sure, despite my frustrations with it (and with the often frankly false claims about it tirelessly repeated by people who identify too strongly with it - it's a programming language, not a signed-in-blood manifesto for world peace and ubiquitous sex), I'm actually still quite engaged in using and learning Rust. It's even my main language for my own projects right now (I no longer work in tech/dev). Some of that is just stubbornness (because I find it hard), but some practical (performance, WASMability etc). I do like the way the type system makes it seem like things snick precisely into place when you get things right. My beef (such as it is) is that I doubt I will ever get to the level of fluency where I 'just code' with it, rather than intermittent stripes of coding & fuming. It takes me probably 4x as long to do anything compared to any other language I've used (and although I'm not a talented programmer, I am a polyglot). Oddly on the cli parsing thing, I did end up finding a library I like - bpaf. It's kind of abstract but seems more conceptually principled than the near-universal clap. The kind of abstraction where once you have grasped a small set of orthogonal concepts, you can just combine them at will, seems OK to me. As contrasted with the type which has dozens of small rules, and special cases that rely heavily on (human) memory and/or constant doc lookups.
      - 3y ago