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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

Rust is too syntax heavy, I don't see it catching on

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think Rust is a bit beyond "catching on" already.

While I agree Rust has a steeper learning curve with its lifetime and borrow checker. Why do you surmise that Rust is too syntax heavy? The BNF of Rust doesn't seem anymore complicated than most of the popular languages.

The current trend of Rust seems to to suggest the opposite as well, with more large adopters.

Large adoption, but I don't think the borrow checker and lifetime are the source of its steep learning curve

Um, what? Are you joking? Mind elaborating?

Rust has gotten tremendous momentum behind it—which is great since it’s introducing a lot of useful, heretofore cutting-edge tech from research into a mainstream language. (Thinking affine types.) Tooling is excellent too.

Wait till you hear about this little language called C++ :-)

C++ is my bread and butter but I don't want my unborn kids to be raised in the world where C++ is not living at the margins. That's despite of all the awesome people putting their sweat and blood in supporting the little languages additional standards.

TBH, compiled general languages are doomed to be complicated, because they need more info during compile-time. The only exception is C (if you don't count stuffs like Lisp). IIRC, C grammar can be easily printed on a single sheet of letter paper.

C is absurdly complicated (just try to understand all the different arithmetic promotion rules that can apply to an expression like "a + b"), you just don't notice it because it doesn't use that complexity for anything except occasionally giving you undefined behaviour.

Unfortunately, the behavior of C’s grammar is incredibly complicated.

I'm not convinced this is true. A simple grammar can express a whole lot of information. I think complex grammar is desirable in some cases because a lot of ways we choose to make grammar more complex are ergonomic. Binary infix operators, various kinds of brackets and braces, ... it all is a bit more difficult to describe as a grammar, sometimes more difficult to learn, but also closer to natural ad-hoc ways that technical people would write things down to communicate them. Just see the typical ways of writing mathematics as an extreme example.

Any language can be compiled whether it's dynamically, weakly typed or not.

Look at Chicken Scheme as an example or my projects compiling Javascript or Python.

https://github.com/eatonphil/pyc

https://github.com/eatonphil/jsc

It's sarcasm! (I'm sure)

We need a programming language that doesn't have syntax

I know this is snark, but there’s an arguably good answer. That’d be Lisp, according to an essay by pg that I’m too lazy to dig up right now. (Probably “revenge of the nerds” or something.) You just write the language in the parse trees.

arguably FORTH has even less syntax

Brainfuck and Piet come to mind... come to think of it, brainfuck compilers might get mad about unmatched brackets. You can't go wrong with Piet, though.

Tried perl? :)

If you compare it with Python, maybe. If you compare it with C++ or Scala, then not even close.

Scala syntax and boilerplate is a lot leaner than both C++ and Rust. Don't mistake weird operators in some hardcore FP libraries for "Scala syntax".

> Don't mistake weird operators in some hardcore FP libraries for "Scala syntax".

Fair, but Jesus every Scala library I look at seems to have its own DSL making the language seem unapproachable.

> I don't see it catching on

But it is! People are (re)writing stuff in Rust and sound very excited about it.

this comment was a great reminder of the level of discourse I should expect on the internet..

what the OP meant was “I don’t see myself using it”, but they instead projected their limited world view as prophetic.

hate to break it, but if we’re entertaining Rust in the Linux kernel, I’m afraid it has already “caught on”

What’s so “heavy” about it?

Is that you, Ken M?

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