Rust did build on the learnings of the past 20 years. Essentially all of its syntax was taken from other languages, even lifetimes.
Rust is trying to solve a really important problem, and so far it might well be one of the best solutions we have for it in a general sense. I 100% support its use in as many places as possible, so that it can evolve. However, its evolution seems to be thwarted by a very vocal subset of its leadership and community who have made it a part of their identity and whatever socio-political leverage toolset they use.
Is complaining about syntax really productive though? What is really going to be done about it?
Just for my own curiosity, do you have an examples of suggestions for how to improve the syntax that have been brought up and dismissed by the language maintainers?
I have no way to properly evaluate that statement. My gut says no, because I see people complain about other things far more often, but I do think it's unknowable.
I'm not involved with Rust any more, and I also agree with you that sometimes Rust leadership can be insular and opaque. But the parent isn't really feedback. It's just a complaint. There's nothing actionable to do here. In fact, when I read the parent's post, I said "hm, I'm not that familiar with Kotlin actually, maybe I'll go check it out," loaded up https://kotlinlang.org/docs/basic-syntax.html, and frankly, it looks a lot like Rust.
But even beyond that: it's not reasonably possible to change a language's entire syntax ten years post 1.0. Sure, you can make tweaks, but turning Rust into Python simply is not going to happen. It would be irresponsible.
Developers have a way of running with a hyoe that can be quite disturbing and detrimental in the long run. The one difference here is that rust has some solid ideas implemented underneath. But the community proselytizing and throwing non-believers under the bus is quite real.
I know that Graydon Hoare is a fan of OCaml and that it was a core inspiration for Rust, and I sometimes wonder if he gets tripped up too by having to switch between Rust-inspired and OCaml-inspired interpretations of the same characters.
For what it's worth, I am not even sure that Graydon was the one who introduced lifetime syntax. He was a fan of terseness, though: Rust's keywords used to be all five characters or shorter.
Niko and pcwalton were the ones working on regions, Niko talks a little bit about the motivation for syntax here: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/03/28/avo...
Later posts include /& as syntax: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/04/25/ref...
Eventually, another syntax: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/07/10/bor... which turns into a &x/ syntax: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/07/17/bor...
Which turns into this one, talking about variants of possible syntax: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/12/30/lif...
At some point, we get the current syntax: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/04/04/nes...
So, it happened somewhere in here...
In general, using english words consisting of a-z is easier to read. Using regex-like mojibake is harder.
For an concrete example in rust, using pipes in lambdas, instead of an arrow, is aweful.
Rust is objectively not mojibake. The equivalent here would be like using a-z, as Rust's syntax is borrowed from other languages in wide use, not anything particularly esoteric. (Unless you could OCaml as esoteric, which I do believe is somewhat arguable but that's only one thing, the argument still holds for the vast majority of the language.)
Concise and much clearer to read vs parentheses where you gotta wonder if the params are just arguments, or a tuple, etc. What are you talking about.
I’ve seen COBOL in the wild. No thanks.
But also, imagine reading a math proof written in English words. That just doesn’t work well.