[defen]

> You said that already[1], this is unsubstantiated and you declined to answer to my rebuttal.

How would you propose to measure the concept of "programming language complexity"? One metric could be "how difficult is it to write programs that do not contain certain classes of bugs"? By that metric, C is indeed incredibly complex. An alternate metric might be "how long does it take the average developer to learn the language well enough to write reasonably effective programs"?

In the absence of formal studies we just have to go by our intuition. Personally, I kinda hate the "I'm not smart enough to write C, so I write Haskell/Rust" argument. It comes across as incredibly condescending to me. What I can tell you from my experience is that I spent a month trying to learn Rust on nights and weekends, and by the end of that was able to write some extremely simple programs with a lot of effort. On the other hand I was making nontrivial contributions to Zig itself within a week of learning the language. So to me, Rust is much more complex than Zig.

[littlestymaar]

I'm not a native English speaker, but as far as I know, the word complexity in English is pretty close to its meaning in French (where it comes from). From Wikipedia:

> Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions.

This is in fact the most antithetical possible description of Rust, which, thanks to its strong type system and compile-time rules, keep the interactions between different components or features as clear and specified as possible.

Yes Rust is hard to learn, but learning curve and complexity are orthogonal concerns.