Agree. I think this is one of the reasons Ada has seen (and continues to see) so little use.

Coming from the Pascal side of programming, the syntax doesn't help to gain adoption in hacker community that grew out of UNIX culture.

In a way I think it is a kind of revenge that most newer languages adopt Pascal style variable and type declarations.

That's kind of an uncharitable way to say, "Rust has a welcoming and beginner-friendly community". It's not like there's a marketing team buying Facebook ads.

I think that's your vision of marketing. Marketing by word of mouth because you really like a product is still marketing, and the Rust community is really good at that.

The Rust community realized early that if they wanted to succeed, they had to talk about Rust a lot, show good examples, be beginner friendly to avoid people picking it up and dropping it quikly. But that "marketing" is also things like a really good package manager, really good compiler errors, a really good VSCode extensions. Many communities don't have this (especially the new ones) and this makes developing in Rust more of a joy than in let's say OCaml or even JS.

I don't know if I'd say beginner (an initio) friendly but we have some really clever people on our forums who have a lot of time for new people.

There will be a book on dlang.org soon, that's the one thing I think we're lacking at the moment.

Rust had Mozilla blog posting about it for a long time.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/

Let's not pretend marketing is just paid Facebook/Google ads.

Ha, only unexpected if you haven't been watching how every other language adoption goes. Otherwise I agree. :)