The examples described here surprising. The first two "issues" are handled quite well in an IDE environment, where jump to definition immediately shows me what I'm looking for. And as I said in another comment, the third "issue" is immediately highlighted by the compiler with a clear error message. I have to wonder if these are really complex design wart in the Rust language that I somehow found quite intuitive or comes from an insufficient effort or misunderstanding of how or why these features work. Rust has other complexity issues no doubt, but I don't feel these belong to that discussion.

> I wonder if part of this has to do with the fact that Rust seems to appeal to a certain type of programmer who is attracted to esoteric topics and arcane knowledge

I find this an unfair take, especially having been a witness to the design process in Rust, where a lot of emphasis and effort is put into coming up with designs that have the right complexity-usefulness balance.

A better way to put it is that Rust matches the values that I care about in a programming language [0][1]. What I love about Rust is that I can rely on it to point out a wider class of mistakes that I'd often make in other languages. Forgetting to deallocate a pointer (C/C++) or using multiple objects when trying to run a synchronized code (Java) often need non-trivial time to debug that ultimately don't teach me anything other than to be more careful. In Rust, I can offload that cognitive load to the compiler. And I find that delightful and satisfying. If it compiled, it is highly likely to be correct, moreso after a refactoring session spanning the entire project. And all this makes the effort in learning whatever complexity Rust has worth it. And I say this with the knowledge that the Rust team is doing their best to address the complexity concerns seriously.

> what a programming language would look like which has an ownership system like Rust, algebraic types, and a trait system, but puts a ruthless emphasis on productivity and eschewing complexity.

Do give this a try. It is likely that you'll have to make different tradeoffs. Or you'll discover novel ideas. Either ways, it'll be a learning experience.

[0] https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-values-rust-an... [1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/rust-tradeoffs/