[handwarmers]

Are the many who disagree that it is unreadable more than the people who agree? I have been involved with the language for a while now, and while I appreciate what you and many others have done for it, the sense that the group is immune to feedback just becomes too palpable too often. That, and the really aggressive PR.

Rust is trying to solve a really important problem, and so far it might well be one of the best solutions we have for it in a general sense. I 100% support its use in as many places as possible, so that it can evolve. However, its evolution seems to be thwarted by a very vocal subset of its leadership and community who have made it a part of their identity and whatever socio-political leverage toolset they use.

[azdle]

I've found the rust core team to be very open to feedback. And maybe I've just been using Rust for too long, but the syntax feels quite reasonable to me.

Just for my own curiosity, do you have an examples of suggestions for how to improve the syntax that have been brought up and dismissed by the language maintainers?

[steveklabnik]

> Are the many who disagree that it is unreadable more than the people who agree?

I have no way to properly evaluate that statement. My gut says no, because I see people complain about other things far more often, but I do think it's unknowable.

I'm not involved with Rust any more, and I also agree with you that sometimes Rust leadership can be insular and opaque. But the parent isn't really feedback. It's just a complaint. There's nothing actionable to do here. In fact, when I read the parent's post, I said "hm, I'm not that familiar with Kotlin actually, maybe I'll go check it out," loaded up https://kotlinlang.org/docs/basic-syntax.html, and frankly, it looks a lot like Rust.

But even beyond that: it's not reasonably possible to change a language's entire syntax ten years post 1.0. Sure, you can make tweaks, but turning Rust into Python simply is not going to happen. It would be irresponsible.

[tayo42]

> the sense that the group is immune to feedback

Is complaining about syntax really productive though? What is really going to be done about it?

[simonask]

This is such a weird take. What do you suggest? Should Rust’s syntax have been democratically decided?

[gmueckl]

Rust is almost git hyoe 2.0. That hyoe set the world up with (a) a dominant VCS that is spectacularly bad at almost everything it does compared to its competitors and (b) the dominant Github social network owned by MS that got ripped to train Copilot.

Developers have a way of running with a hyoe that can be quite disturbing and detrimental in the long run. The one difference here is that rust has some solid ideas implemented underneath. But the community proselytizing and throwing non-believers under the bus is quite real.