There was no "design committee" for Rust.

I'm increasingly skeptical that any language with lifetimes can be anything other than "ugly to read". People complain about syntax, but what they're really complaining about is semantics.

Was? New junk is added to Rust every few weeks, using past tense seems intentionally deceitful, as does re-characterizing my comment. I really do mean ugly as in ugly. That's why I wrote that.

One of the strongest factors behind a lot of people choosing to stay away from Rust is that so many conversations with advocates are met with toxic and subtly toxic behavior. They demean software that's not memory safe the way that politicians use their words to sow anger. C has won, and Rust blew it's shot aiming at C++ instead.

As Amazon swallows Rust and spits all the refuse out, I can't help but smile, because it's a community that's been begging for obsolescence via their attitudes and behaviors since day one.

You seem awfully angry about programming languages!

The Rust community is by a wide margin the most welcoming and positive Internet community I've personally seen.

In no small part because they don't make comments like this one.

Welcoming? Yes. Positive? I don't know.

The thing that really surprised me about Rust is the significance of a semicolon at the end of a function body. E.g.:

    fn foo { 1; }

Returns unit while

    fn foo { 1 }

Returns 1. This reminds me of nothing so much as the infamous JavaScript ASI footgun where this returns undefined:

    function foo() {
      return
      2;
    }

It's not just the function's body, it's any block. Blocks in rust are expressions and return their last statement's value. It's nothing like Javascript's ASI where it's just inserting ; implicitly and only `return` can return a value.

It's also nothing like Javascript because Rust is statically typed. If you accidentally insert a semi-colon (or not), you're almost guaranteed to get a compile error.

The second function is a syntax error since you are not declaring the return value in the function signature.