I have a similar opinion. What puts me off about the language is it's horrendously ugly syntax and toxic, cult-like community (maybe these types are a minority, but they are awfully loud).
I would rather read someone else's Perl script than Rust.
It's very much one of these new-age languages that feel the need to reinvent every wheel and invent entirely new syntactical idioms just so they can be different.
And yeah, the "just use rust, pleb" attitude is also super offputting. I'm not interested in dealing with people like that when I'm learning a language. I have plenty of much, much less terrible options.
Let is redundant, that's what the = is for. Unless it's meant to be equivalent to 'var' or 'auto', in which case it's even worse.
Let contains no information, it's pointless clutter that replaced something that did contain vital information. Let tells you the next symbol is a variable. What type? Who knows and who cares, it's a variable, deal with it. C marks a symbol as a variable by using its type name.
I mean, this was a very large part of why Perl is so miserable. I will never understand why people choose to implement this in modern languages.
Anyway, variables and parameters without explicit, visible type information is a hard no for me. I took a sniff of a couple rust projects, saw this mess, and decided that rust is not for me. I don't care about all the other magical benefits that cure all my ails, this feature is a dealbreaker, full stop.
Not indicating the type is idiomatic in Rust, but you can annotate it:
let commit_message: String = repo.head().peel_to_commit().ok()?.message()?.into();
let commit_message = repo.head().peel_to_commit().ok()?.message()?.to_string();
Note that IDEs are displaying type hints anyway (without you having to type them), so you don't have to suffer if walking through a codebase where people are annotating their types too little for comfort
What new syntactical idioms did Rust invent? It’s pretty plain and easy to read, anyone who has looked at C, C++, Python, C#, Java or anything modern will grok it pretty easily.
? operator is fine, especially if you’re used to JS or C#, and hardly take up much space.
Pointer types are what, & and * ? Fine if you’re coming from c, c++ and don’t take up much space.
.async is the weirdest for sure, but again hardly strange or disgusting.
What about any of this is worse than if I smashed my face into my keyboard but hit only the $*%#•¥$><~.,!=&@£.?!’ characters, aka writing Perl? Or anything as totally alien as Haskell?
Most Rust I read or write, if I squint, looks like Python with a few extra braces and semicolons.
No disagreement about Perl's ugliness..
Macros are syntax though.
In terms of syntax, you create a box with Box::new just like you might any other struct.
EDIT: anyway I'm not saying that means that your underlying issue isn't real, just that I think describing it as "syntax" makes the issue confusing to understand. It sounds to me like maybe you think Rust programs are too verbose?