There is a huge unreadability right there staring at me: What does that Box<> do, and why? Rust is borrowing more and more of the obscurities of C++, and thats not a good thing...
I'd be interested to know if anyone has done interesting conceptual and/or empirical work on readability. It seems like a very slippery and difficult concept to me. Readable to whom? Readable in the small or the large?
I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. And I think the gist of it is: Do it like everybody else does, first and foremost, strange and unfamiliar equals unreadable.
I think that's a very different case. Maybe some analogies might be drawn between some of that work and some of the lower-level aspects of reading code (related to syntax noise etc), but code readability, if it's a defensible concept at all, is a far more complex and layered phenomenon than letter & word recognition.
The first thing a researcher would need to establish is whether or not readability even exists as a natural kind apart from familiarity. I don't know the field, so this might already have been pursued somewhere.
Agreed. Note the same applies to Haskell's syntax :)
People confuse "readable" with "based in my knowledge of Java and C, I can't make head or tails of this notation without reading a tutorial first", which in my opinion is not a sensible conclusion.
GP should note that C++’s unique_ptr isn’t an obscurity.
That would be very misleading since Box represents a heap-allocated owned value
It doesn't matter if some people are confused, because you can just explain what it is in 3 seconds. What's important for such a ubiquitous type is that the name is short.