This reminds me of the years I wasted writing C++, always looking for the idiomatic approach, rather than learning about security, networking, architecture and so on. In exactly the same way, Rust is just too complicated.
The nice thing about Rust is that it allows you to compartmentalize complexity very nicely by creating rules the compiler will enforce, whereas with C++ the programmer is also burdened with knowing them.
I’m not sure if I’d say that it’s more complicated than Python, since Python’s flexibility can in practice lead to creative but very hard-to-follow code.
If a significant number of the developers that come into contact with a language think it's hard, then... it's very likely hard.
With built-in style lints and Clippy, Rust is doing quite well in keeping codebases simple and idiomatic.
a) the language designers decided to cram several paradigms into it, including a heavier than usual dose of functional.
b) most people don't want to get pedantic about resource management
c) the syntax is weird for people coming from the C language family
Rust is actually really close to JavaScript in that regard, with its mix of OOP-without-inheritance and the whole collection of functional method on Arrays and iterators (map, reduce, etc.). And while People have a ton of complain about JavaScript, none of them is «the JavaScript language is too complex».
> b) most people don't want to get pedantic about resource management
But Rust is explicitly aimed at people who do! You can't use Python or JavaScript to write a web browser, a kernel or anything where performance is paramount.
> c) the syntax is weird for people coming from the C language family
What ? Do you mean “ not coming from the C language family”? Because its syntax is clearly in the C-family (semicolon, braces).
My guess is that they're talking about the syntax inspired from its ML roots, like `let/let mut`, `->` for return types, and `:` for type annotations. I personally prefer these to the C-style equivalents, but I've talked with enough people who haven't used an ML-like language that I'm not quite as surprised as I used to be about people expressing misgivings about them.