Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

The reasons do not matter here. It is still ugly / noisy / overly-complicated and probably could have been done better.

I understand pattern matching deconstructions, I have seen it in other languages. Funnily enough they were nowhere as ugly / noisy / complicated as Rust's is. Rust seems to have bolted on a lot of fancy shit that may be appealing to a lot of people and that is it.

In your link, the first one is fugly, the last one is fine. Maybe Rust just encourages ugly (i.e. complicated) code a bit too much.

View on HN

As someone who mostly writes Clojure code professionally during the day, I agree, Rust's syntax is complicated for no good reason, ugly and overly-verbose. But then I think that about most Algol-like language too, not just Rust.

And despite that I do use Rust when I want something simple to deploy/deliver, as handing over a binary that just runs is such a nice experience, and it's real easy to make fast. As long as I don't have to maintain in long-term, Rust is fine for what it is.

I like Rust’s syntax and dislike Elixir/Ruby’s. I also prefer Erlang’s to Elixir, lol.

> It is still ugly / noisy / overly-complicated and probably could have been done better.

I don't know, it feels like you're just saying that you don't like it, missed the point of the post, and are not giving us anything concrete. Can you list a very clear example of how you'd improve the syntax?

Again, see the post: You can remove things, but you're losing explicitness or other things. If you want a language that's more implicit, this is fine. I don't.

> Can you list a very clear example of how you'd improve the syntax?

The demand that I must design a better language to have valid criticism is absurd - I don't need to be a chef to know food tastes bad, do I? I'm a user of languages, not a language designer. My job is to evaluate whether Rust's syntax serves my needs, not to solve the PL design problems that led to it.

The syntax is noisy. That's not "missing the point" - that's the direct consequence of the design choices you're defending. If your argument is "the complexity is necessary for memory safety" fine, but don't pretend the cost doesn't exist or that pointing it out is invalid.

You're conflating "can identify a problem" with "must solve the problem". Those are different skills. I'm evaluating Rust as a user, not auditioning as a language designer.

No, I just don't think you have identified a problem in the first place. You've complained a lot, but you've not even been specific enough to point at a single concrete thing! You've been so lacking in specifics I don't even know if you'd prefer Ocaml, Go, or Python-style syntax over Rust! Like, I can't tell since all you've said is that you don't like it, without even telling me how you don't like it or what you prefer!

You say "over-complicated". I disagree, my impression is that is mostly about as complicated as it needs to be to solve the problems it is trying to solve.

Symbol soup and layers of hell that is abstractions. A language in which it is valid syntax to have 6 symbols next to each other is a bad idea.

You do not have to know what programming language I prefer either[1]. Why would you?

[1] If you are curious, I have talked quite a lot about it, along with why I dislike Rust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com