[blub]

It's because:

a) the language designers decided to cram several paradigms into it, including a heavier than usual dose of functional.

b) most people don't want to get pedantic about resource management

c) the syntax is weird for people coming from the C language family

[littlestymaar]

> a) the language designers decided to cram several paradigms into it, including a heavier than usual dose of functional.

Rust is actually really close to JavaScript in that regard, with its mix of OOP-without-inheritance and the whole collection of functional method on Arrays and iterators (map, reduce, etc.). And while People have a ton of complain about JavaScript, none of them is «the JavaScript language is too complex».

> b) most people don't want to get pedantic about resource management

But Rust is explicitly aimed at people who do! You can't use Python or JavaScript to write a web browser, a kernel or anything where performance is paramount.

> c) the syntax is weird for people coming from the C language family

What ? Do you mean “ not coming from the C language family”? Because its syntax is clearly in the C-family (semicolon, braces).

[saghm]

> What ? Do you mean “ not coming from the C language family”? Because its syntax is clearly in the C-family (semicolon, braces).

My guess is that they're talking about the syntax inspired from its ML roots, like `let/let mut`, `->` for return types, and `:` for type annotations. I personally prefer these to the C-style equivalents, but I've talked with enough people who haven't used an ML-like language that I'm not quite as surprised as I used to be about people expressing misgivings about them.

[littlestymaar]

Thanks I haven't thought about that part, but nowadays it has become kind of mainstream: JavaScript uses let/const and typescript uses the colon notation for type. And I've never heard anyone complaining about those for the complexity of their syntax.

[pcwalton]

I'm sure a lot of people don't care about explicitly managing resources! But there are a lot of people who do, and they need a language to use.