Getting Past “Ampersand-Driven Development” in Rust
This is a great post demonstrating just how bad the ergonomics of Rust are (I know I know, that&#x27;s not the point of Rust). But for people who care about language usability you can point to this post and say &quot;they were not thinking about the user journey during the design process, how would you have designed it differently?&quot;<p>Take the first two sections as a perfect example. You decide you want to introduce a single-character control symbol `&amp;` (which is questionable by itself), how do you apply it? In one case you decide that this control symbol indicates that a value is immutable and in another it&#x27;s part of the declaration of a value as explicitly mutable. You&#x27;ve now introduced a semantic contradiction that a learner has to overcome.<p>Now obviously Rust <i>works</i>, and that&#x27;s its point, and people love that enough to overcome all the ergonomic challenges the language puts up. What I can&#x27;t wait for is <i>Pythonic</i> Rust where we have a language that treats humans as first class citiziens but offers the guarantees that Rust does. The only question in my mind for if this will ever happen is if the fully literate programming modality enabled by LLMs will make it a moot point.