Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#71

Post by toolslive » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:27 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #63

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a nice example of a Trait that has async functions: fn list_items ( &'life0 self, collection_href: &'life1 str, ) -> Pin , Error>> + Send + 'async_trait>> where Self: 'async_trait, 'life0: 'async_trait, 'life1: 'async_trait, Rendered docs: https://mirror.whynothugo.nl/vdirsyncer/v2.0.0-beta0/vstorag... Source: https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/vdirsyncer-rs/tree/v2.0.0-beta...

The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language. It's made worse by the fact that you can still use '...' as s character literal. Not only is is incredibly ugly it's also rather confusing, but it fits well into how I view Rust, complicated for the sake of making the developers look smart. It wouldn't fit the syntax of the language obviousl…

in OCaml, the single quote is a valid char for an identifier:

    let f = ... and 
    let f' = ...

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#72

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:29 AM UTC

toolslive wrote: post #71

mrweasel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language. It's made worse by the fact that you can still use '...' as s character literal. Not only is is incredibly ugly it's also rather confusing, but it fits well into how I view Rust, complicated for the sake of making the developers look smart. It wouldn't fit the syntax of the language obviousl…

in OCaml, the single quote is a valid char for an identifier: let f = ... and let f' = ...

I did not know that, and I question that choice as well. Why would you use that?

It's a little less bad, because you can just have your own style guide that says "Don't do that".

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#73

Post by lifthrasiir » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #63

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a nice example of a Trait that has async functions: fn list_items ( &'life0 self, collection_href: &'life1 str, ) -> Pin , Error>> + Send + 'async_trait>> where Self: 'async_trait, 'life0: 'async_trait, 'life1: 'async_trait, Rendered docs: https://mirror.whynothugo.nl/vdirsyncer/v2.0.0-beta0/vstorag... Source: https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/vdirsyncer-rs/tree/v2.0.0-beta...

The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language. It's made worse by the fact that you can still use '...' as s character literal. Not only is is incredibly ugly it's also rather confusing, but it fits well into how I view Rust, complicated for the sake of making the developers look smart. It wouldn't fit the syntax of the language obviousl…

Many languages (mostly functional) allow trailing apostrophes after alphanumeric identifiers, which mirror primes in mathematical and technical notations, so there are surely precedents.

Rust doesn't allow multi-letter character literals for the usual reason, so there is no real ambiguity. Some old editors do only have a very-limited syntax highlighter with fixed rules (e.g. no regexp), so such editors will be indeed unable to handle this, but they won't be able to support many other languages if that's the case.

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#74

Post by atoav » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:32 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #63

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a nice example of a Trait that has async functions: fn list_items ( &'life0 self, collection_href: &'life1 str, ) -> Pin , Error>> + Send + 'async_trait>> where Self: 'async_trait, 'life0: 'async_trait, 'life1: 'async_trait, Rendered docs: https://mirror.whynothugo.nl/vdirsyncer/v2.0.0-beta0/vstorag... Source: https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/vdirsyncer-rs/tree/v2.0.0-beta...

The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language. It's made worse by the fact that you can still use '...' as s character literal. Not only is is incredibly ugly it's also rather confusing, but it fits well into how I view Rust, complicated for the sake of making the developers look smart. It wouldn't fit the syntax of the language obviousl…

I agree that this is a stupid choice. Yet I wrote many reliable and performant programs without using lifetime specifiers once. One of those programs was a text tokenizer that got second place on performance and was only beaten by a highly optimized piece of assembler.

This is not nothing if you ask me. Rust is a language within which your shifty naive program will still outperform many other solutions, all while being reliable as heck if you wield the type system the right way.

The only thing that I dislike about it is that certain code becomes unreadable. As this article says it often becomes unreadable for a reason — a reason which you would just not think about in other languages — but unreadable is still unreadable.

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#75

Post by bvrmn » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:36 AM UTC

timeon wrote: post #28

mjburgess wrote: post #9

Kinda disingenuous, you don't reskin one language in another to make an argument about syntax -- you develop a clear syntax for a given semantics. That's what rust did not do -- it copied c++/java-ish, and that style did not support the weight. When type signatures are so complex it makes vastly more sense to separate them out, Consider, read :: AsRef(Path) -> IO.Result(Vec(U8)) pub fn read(path): inner :: &Path -> I…

Now there are too many colons.

Original code contains more. (::). Personally I don't understand why there are `::` and `.` to access deeper namespace levels. It's a static language, compiler should know how to resolve attributes and `.` should be enough for all cases.

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#76

Post by lifthrasiir » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:38 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #69

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language Can you clarify why you have that opinion? What would your syntax suggestion have been?

Because pretty much any other language has '...' for strings, or at least something to do with text. It's also a character that in all other languages (that I know of) must be closed with another '. Now you could say, we don't close it in contractions in English, so there's a case where one ' can just exist on it's own. That's sort of fine, a bit outside of the realm of programming, but fine, but then I think you sho…

> Because pretty much any other language has '...' for strings, or at least something to do with text.

I think you didn't use that many languages to see other forms [1]. LISP and Scheme don't have single-quoted string literals for example. Double-quoted strings are not really universal either, for example SQL uses single-quoted strings and double-quoted names.

[1] https://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages.ht...

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#77

Post by GoblinSlayer » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:40 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #69

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language Can you clarify why you have that opinion? What would your syntax suggestion have been?

Because pretty much any other language has '...' for strings, or at least something to do with text. It's also a character that in all other languages (that I know of) must be closed with another '. Now you could say, we don't close it in contractions in English, so there's a case where one ' can just exist on it's own. That's sort of fine, a bit outside of the realm of programming, but fine, but then I think you sho…

In rust "macro" would be abbreviated to "mac".

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#78

Post by kelnos » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:41 AM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #9

Kinda disingenuous, you don't reskin one language in another to make an argument about syntax -- you develop a clear syntax for a given semantics. That's what rust did not do -- it copied c++/java-ish, and that style did not support the weight. When type signatures are so complex it makes vastly more sense to separate them out, Consider, read :: AsRef(Path) -> IO.Result(Vec(U8)) pub fn read(path): inner :: &Path -> I…

Rust does allow you to split out generic specifications into a separate "declaration block" so things don't get too busy. Like you could write the original Rust code as:

    pub fn read(path: P) -> io::Result>
    where
        P: AsRef,
    {
        // ...
    }

Personally I don't find your example with the type signature completely separate to be easier to read. Having to look in more than one place doesn't really make sense to me.

Funny, though, Rust's 'where' syntax sorta vaguely superficially reminds me of K&R pre-ANSI C:

    unsigned char *read(path)
        const char *path;
    {
        /* ... */
    }

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#79

Post by hyperpape » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:42 AM UTC

frankie_t wrote: post #41

eterps wrote: post #6

Just give me Rattlesnake or CrabML and I'll stop complaining :-)

Wanted to say the same. He straight up conjured a good looking code in CrabML as an example of similar level of "ugliness", while it has about three times less syntax noise.

It ends in ";;". If that's not a typo, and it's semantically significant that there are two semicolons instead of one, that sounds quite finicky.

Re: Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

#80

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 9:42 AM UTC

toolslive wrote: post #71

mrweasel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language. It's made worse by the fact that you can still use '...' as s character literal. Not only is is incredibly ugly it's also rather confusing, but it fits well into how I view Rust, complicated for the sake of making the developers look smart. It wouldn't fit the syntax of the language obviousl…

in OCaml, the single quote is a valid char for an identifier: let f = ... and let f' = ...

[deleted]