Or it could have killed it on the vine because the syntax was too esoteric and would have pushed the target demographic away before they even tried it. It's har

Or it could have killed it on the vine because the syntax was too esoteric and would have pushed the target demographic away before they even tried it. It's hard to test the counter factual in this case. A common topic of conversation in the rust project is the concept of "weirdness budget": the idea that you can only be so different from what your expected userbase already knows before you become too hard to learn. I don't think you could introduce the borrow checker on a language like Erlang if you're aiming at systems programming. But now you could make a language that is slightly more weird (introducing other features) than Rust when targeting existing Rust programmers.