[jasonjmcghee]

I'm going to assume, based on when he said "As a slightly more serious and useful exercise" and then proceeds to remove each piece of the code that's intentionally there for performance and safety, that the whole post is satire?

[munificent]

The second sentence of the post is the thesis: "I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust’s syntax, they actually object to Rust’s semantics."

By removing the ugly "syntax" (and thus also removing important semantics), they're showing that the reason Rust has a lot going on syntactically is because the code is actually expressing important semantics. You can't have a nicer Rust syntax without losing semantics in the process.