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> Complexity (not conceptual difficulty) seems to be the general culturally accepted norm.

Can you give an example of what you mean by "complexity"? I think this could be an instance of people simply having different definitions.




In a way it's tricky to encapsulate, precisely because I do mean 'complexity' rather than 'conceptual difficulty', and complexity spreads through systems in thousands of small ways. Clap's one example - it's not only immensely hard to use (compared to what you find in other languages), but this is compounded by the fact that it's the library everyone recommends when asked online. This speaks to a cultural acceptance of complexity within the Rust community. I've found the same with nearly all of the commonly used libraries I've needed. As soon as I needed to do anything custom with serde it took me hours to figure out how. I gave up on all the general database libraries trying do some simple persistence to sqlite (though I did end up with rusqlite, which is genuinely simple). The utility traits smear complexity throughout just about everything an application programmer needs to do.

Without a lot of experience (not to mention vast amounts of memorisation), everything is just hard and slow to get done. And I do mean by comparison with other languages I've used, from Objective-C to Java, from Typescript to Elixir (and many others).

Again, this isn't necessarily a complaint about the complexity per se. It might be necessary (I don't feel I know enough to judge), given Rust's uses and constraints. But the community consistently and obviously denies the difficulty. I think I understand the sources of the denial. But that doesn't make it any less irritating!


Here's an example (of complexity or difficulty, or .. whatever your preferred defs/vocab) that arose for me today (but on any day I do any Rust programming or reading I could find a similar example).

This is an answer on the forums to a fairly beginnery-looking question: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-does-borrow-mean/81794/3

In what language ecosystem other than Rust would that answer arise as an answer to a beginner's question? Haskell, or a research language perhaps. I can't make head or tail of the Rust Playground example there. In fact if I look through most of recent questions on the Rust forum, there's probably 1 in 10 where I even grok the question, let alone the answer. I haven't experienced this elsewhere. Rust has a culture of complexity, and its community is in a state of denial about it (for I think a fairly obvious reason). Furious denunciations ensue even if anyone dare suggest such a thing!




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