[ben-schaaf]

> littered with too many special symbols and very verbose

This seems kinda self-contracticting. Special symbols are there to make the syntax terse, not verbose. Perhaps your issue is not with how things are written, but that there's a lot of information for something that seems simpler. In other words a lot of semantic complexity, rather than an issue with syntax.

[NoGravitas]

I think it's also that Rust needs you to be very explicit about things that are very incidental to the intent of your code. In a sense that's true of C, but in C worrying about those things isn't embedded in the syntax, it's in lines of code that are readable (but can also go unwritten or be written wrong). In the GCed languages Rust actually competes with (outside the kernel) — think more like C# or Kotlin, less like Python — you do not have to manage that incidental complexity, which makes Rust look 'janky'.