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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

Rust is pretty expressive. Horrible syntax... that's just a subjective measure. I wish programmers would get over it, because it's a huge hindrance to trying a large number of languages out there with lots of nice things. But people are gonna be people, so it won't happen.

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Yeah, I agree that it's highly subjective. And I don't mean that people shouldn't chose something just based on one variable, it obviously depends. No language is perfect for every use case. Personally I use Rust for a lot of things, even though I'm more productive in other languages, but sometimes it's just a really good fit for the problem.

Pseudo-code, but this is how I see the difference in expressiveness and syntax:

   3.times {
      println('Foobar')
   }

   for i in 0..3 {
      println!("Foobar")
   }

Both of them makes sense though, so not a huge difference, but it's the same way in lots of ways in Rust in general.

> because it's a huge hindrance to trying a large number of languages out there with lots of nice things

I know exactly what you're talking about, as most of the time I work in Clojure, and trying to show Clojure to other programmers who are used to C-like languages and never heard of any lisp-like language is a constant struggle, as their first reaction is always "eww, parenthesizes everywhere!" even though their favorite language usually has the same amount or even more.

Ruby is fine until your large application starts to include more and more dependencies. There is no coherent API across, every library has it's own mini DSL and the mess starts to build up. Then it comes method_missing, monkey patching and strings and dictionaries passing in all the places. True horror. All Ruby's readability dissapears. Small apps look beautiful, but large ones quickly become a mess. On top of that resource utilization is atrocious. But there are places where Ruby shines like RSpec, Rails, pry in runtime (I miss that one).

That's one of the aspects in which Crystal shines.

It retains most of the flexibility and DSL capabilities, but the type- and nil-safety allow you to leverage them without nasty surprises at runtime.

Not having to guess what a method or block returns and instead having the compiler tell you when you get it wrong makes an enormous difference.

Rust is spiky, like a crab.

I've been learning Rust over the last few months, because it seems like a good language to have on my CV.

It's certainly a taste thing, but I am not enjoying it at all. I find it unpleasant. I think it's going to join the short list of "languages I can use but would prefer not to".

I've never learned Crystal, but if it's like Ruby, then I think I'd enjoy it just fine.

It's funny how taste works. I love writing Rust. To the point that almost all of my personal projects are now in the Rust.

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