[ori_prior]

I find languages with symbols far easier to read than verbose textual syntax like in BASIC or pascal. Symbols like (), {}, [] satisfy my need for symmetry and are far easier to correlate than BEGIN/END. I find Python very unreadable due to the whitespace/alignment thingy, I always get the urge to hold a ruler to my screen to see if somebody forgot a space somewhere.

That said, Rust is okay because it uses symbols, but not okay because it uses them in very weird ways. Macro function stuff that needs a ! like whatever!() is aggravating. The exclamation mark is easy to overlook, easy to mix up with letters, isn't surrounded by spaces and frankly I do not see the point. That syntax doesn't really add anything to the safety of the language that couldn't just be done with a few 'you are overriding stuff' warnings. Actually it makes things worse, because if somebody has stuff() and stuff!() defined, there is hard-to-distinguish weirdness going on. Also aggravating but not as dangerous are 'labels. Oh, and angle brackets like <'stuff> that could easily also be comparison operators somwhere else. Rust would have had the opportunity to fix the mistakes in C++, but it just copied them.

Oh, and all the 'mut' everywhere is also weird noise that would be easier if left out. Most things are 'mut', so write out 'const' instead.

[phicoh]

I agree with most of what you said, but I disagree about mut.

Mut makes the unsafe case stand out. It also requires less typing to have the safe case.