Patricia Asa has an excellent presentation[0] on how she tried to learned C# and one of the biggest things she discovered was these bad cross-over abstractions held her back.
I'm trying to learn Rust, working through various programming exercises, but it looks and feels very foreign to me.
One example is the closure syntax. Compared to Go where closures look just like function definitions, closures in Rust look needlessly complex.
I also always find myself wanting to type mut &a instead of the correct &mut a. The former just seems more obvious to me, a reference to a is &a. Mutable a is mut a. So a mutable reference must be mut &a.
Then the lifetime syntax, I don't even know what to think of that, but that's probably more because I'm struggling asking myself "Should I use a lifetime here, or am I doing something else wrong that is preventing the compiler from figuring it out."
Maybe these things make more sense to people coming from C.
I think there is such a thing as liking what's familiar, but there are also design decisions which are simply easier to read or easier to parse. Another one would be semicolons: I have never missed semicolons one bit in a language where they're not required.
I dutifully wrote semicolons for years, but just a short stint of Scala and I don't like using them anywhere now.