Or the endless arguments about await, or that time I cried because the discussion over what we call integers was so contentious. We all cared quite a bit about syntax. Heck that’s partially why almost none of it is novel!

I don’t think that when people say “Rust has ugly syntax” they mean that Rust has ugly syntax. It seems that what they are complaining about is actually Rust semantics, which needs extra syntax to express it.

Blog post idea: express this snippet (with references, aliasing control, generics and all) in pseudo C++, Java, Python, etc. Then express “reading a file in gc language with exceptions” in pseudo Rust.