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Comment by jerven | Hacker News Reader

Could you expand upon this? sounds like an interesting opinion/experience that is worth sharing in more detail.

It doesn't. Most people complaining about "ugliness" of Rust are either too lazy to read documentation (which is great btw), or just don't like the syntax, because it doesn't resemble their favorite language[s]. Some have valid criticism, but they usually lay it out straight, sometimes in the form of a blog post, instead of vague "Rust is bad" statements.

i mean..don't act like it's impossible for someone to have a well-informed opinion that Rust is bad. It is an opinion and for some people, Rust is bad! I've given it multiple shakes and can't see myself using it. Don't like the values, the syntax, or the design.

it's just a fact that i can't imagine a situation where i'd use rust over haskell. I'd sooner generate a C program via Haskell eDSL than use Rust if I were to do embedded work, for instance.

And aside from embedded, Haskell clears Rust kind of comically if I lay out a matrix of what I care about in a PL.

It's not impossible. But if one says "Rust is bad", they better elaborate, unless their goal was to post a meaningless comment.

well yeah I wouldn't make that tier of low effort comment I'd at least have a single sentence of color

Nobody is saying you can’t have an informed opinion, you just have yet to explain what your opinion actually means.

You don't have to exhaustively defend your opinion though. "I think X is bad/ugly/etc. $HIGH_LEVEL_COLOR" is plenty imo. You don't have to prove your opinions.

> You don't have to prove your opinions.

You're jumping a few steps ahead, and that's not what we're asking for.

> you can't even properly use its functions to build capital-A abstractions because it's compiler is too dumb to optimize them properly

This line in particular is what (multiple) people are indicating makes no sense. You don't have to exhaustively defend your opinion, but you could write a more insightful opinion. There's a difference at play here.

Capital-A abstraction means lambda calculus. Compiler too dumb means you can't just program with functions & write said Abstractions (which map cleanly to proofs via HC) in Rust because it does not handle them well.

There we go :)

I like Rust a great deal and really enjoy using it, but I also think it's kind of ugly. Like I'm talking surface level aesthetics, purely subjective. I can't quite put my finger on why. I think it's to do with the heavy use of special characters?

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