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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

My problem with rust is not the learning curve, but the absolute ugliness of the syntax. It's like Perl and C++ template metaprogramming had a child. I just can't stand it.

Python is my favourite, C is elegance in simplicity and Go is tolerable.

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C may be simple, but its too simple to be called elegant. The lack of namespacing comes to mind. Or that it is a staticly typed language, whose type system is barely enforced (you have to declare all types, but sometimes it feels like everything decays to int and *void without the right compiler incantations). Or the build system, where you have to learn a separate language to generate a separate language to compile the program (which a both also not really simple and elegant in my eyes). Or null-terminated strings: to save some 7 bytes per string (on modern platforms) C uses one of the most dangerous and unelegant constructs in the popular part of the programming-world. Or the absolutely inelegant error handling, where you either return an in-band-error-value, set a global variable or both or just silently fail. Or the standard-library, that is littered with dangerous functions. Or the reliance of the language definition on undefined behaviour, that forces you to read a 700-page, expensive document back to back to know whether a vital check in your program might be ignored by compilers or when your program might shred your hard drive, despite you never instructing it to do so. Or...

C has a simple syntax, but it is most certainly not elegant.

C is elegant because as an extremely powerful programming language used to create an uncountable number of high-profile projects it's simple enough that I feel optimistic I could write a C compiler myself if it was really necessary.

It may be impractical for some tasks but the power:complexity rate is very impressive. Lua feels similar in that regard.

The mechanism for sharing definitions, 'include' aka "copy file here", is absolutely not elegant. The absolute minimum you could do maybe, but not elegant.

Not to mention the whacky preprocessor as a whole...

I would say includes/standard library/compilers going crazy on UB is part of the infrastructure or ecosystem around the language and not the language itself. And I agree absolutely, while C the language is beautiful, the infra around it is atrocious.

Modula-2 is elegant. C is hacked together. Both have equal power and mostly map 1:1, but design matters. Writing a Modula compiler would be easier.

There's no discussing taste, especially with syntax. Personally I find the Rust syntax unoffensive, while the Go syntax comes off kind of … weird, with type signatures especially looking kind of like run-on sentences by someone who hates punctuation. C's type signatures come off as a turgid mess to me; stuff like this https://www.ericgiguere.com/articles/reading-c-declarations.... is just a design mistake as far as I'm concerned. And Python … kind of goes into the "ah, I give up, slap an `Any` signature on it" territory.

And some people love that! It just ain't for everyone.

Have you had a look at Nim? I think you may like it.

I love the look and feel of Nim, but found it to be stuck in a weird chicken-and-egg situation where it didn't have enough of a following to have a Convenient Package For Everything, ultimately turning me off it. Of course I recognize that the only way a language gets a Convenient Package For Everything is if it gets popular, but still...

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