[ajross]

I picked APL because it matches the "WTF cray cray" aesthetic that Rust's syntax presents to new users. I can see an argument that Ada is the right analogy if you're going for pure complexity.

And yes, Fortran, APL, Ada (also Modula-2 & Oberon, Smalltalk and a bunch of other forgotten languages presented as the Next Big Thing at the time) are all uniformly simpler than either C++ or Rust. The modern world is a more complicated place and programming tools have kept up.