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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Oh, don't be silly. Exactly the same point you're making about rust can be made about both C++ and perl by expert practitioners. Syntactic complexity is linear with expressive power, that's why it's complex to begin with. You just "like" rust, so you view it as a good tradeoff there and not in other languages that you "dislike".

My point above was that this decision is basically one of fashion and not technology. And the proof is how the general consensus about awk has evolved over 20 years as perl has declined.

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Are you confusing syntax with grammar? Rust has a large grammar—many reserved words, many compile-time macros, etc.—but not too much in the way of syntax (e.g. novel punctuational operators; novel kinds of literals; etc.)

C++ and Perl, meanwhile, both have tons and tons of syntax, such that they're 1. harder to grasp for people who haven't seen them before, and 2. harder to learn (especially by attempting to Google language features "by name.")

If there was a spectrum with Lisp [or Forth] on one end and APL on the other, Rust might be somewhere right-of-center... but it'd still be pretty far left of C++ and Perl.

Also, given the languages that occupy the ends of said spectrum, I think it should be clear that your position on said spectrum has no correspondence with "expressive power" :)

You said it better than I could :)

Awk has evolved? GNU Awk has---somewhat. It has a clumsy facility in the place of a proper FFI called the "extension API" for binding to C libraries. You need to compile C code to use it, and the API has been a moving target. It has a way to work with XML. It has an "in place" editing mode, and other things like bignum integer support via GMP (requiring the -M option to be used). Plus various minor extensions to POSIX, like full regex support in RS (record separator), a way to tokenize fields positively rather than delimit by matching their separators, a way to extract fixed-width fields, an @include mechanism, a way to indirect on functions and such. None of it adds up to very much.

I like C++, but it's not the language that you would design if you hadn't accumulated so much cruft over the years. Rust didn't have to support C compatibility and compatibility with earlier C++ standards. So Rust could be designed properly for modern use cases.

There's necessary complexity to express certain concepts, but C++ has accumulated a lot of unnecessary complexity over the years.

Rust, in terms of GC-less languages with mostly zero-cost abstractions is the simplest language that I've seen. And having a GCless language with memory safety is not just fashion. It's pretty much the greatest single advancement in language design since the GC itself.

> Syntactic complexity is linear with expressive power

Have you taken a serious look at a lisp? You might be pleasently surprised. Everything that can be said about lisp has probably already been said, but I'd argue that sexprs have a much higher expressive/complexity ratio than say the C++ grammar.

Somewhat relative xkcd[1]

[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/224:_Lisp

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