[steveklabnik]

One way to read you comment, which maybe you didn't intend, is "this is a language for Real Work, not one for those silly academics." I don't personally think you went that far, but I imagine that is how the parent read it.

I think it's the "for" to the end of the sentence that does it.

[ironmagma]

That would make sense. On the contrary, though, I quite admire whitepapers’ use of FP and would like to learn it someday. But my understanding is that there are already quite a few languages devoted to that, and Rust’s focus is something different. After all, if you have the same goals as another language, you just may end up re-creating the same language with different syntax. That said, it would be nice if someday Rust could be as convenient to write FP in as say Lisp or Haskell.