• Rust wants to have easy-to-parse unambiguous syntax. This makes turbofish required when you have a type in expression context. You need `->` for the return type.

• Rust uses generics, and angle brackets are ugly. It also mandates `{}` in blocks, but allows skipping `()`, which gives you a high ratio of ugly brackets to the nice round ones :)

• Rust wants to make up for the cost of explicitness by adding abbreviations. So you have `fn` that's both explicit and terse. Instead of verbose `switch/case/default`, Rust's `match` uses patterns and `_ =>`.

Rust designers pay a lot of attention to the syntax, but it's designed from a very practical point of view (it is clear? unambiguous? easy to write? composes with other syntax?), and "does it look neat?" is very low on the priority list.