Rust is surprisingly expressive
I don't think the ability to write expressions similar to natural language like "2.days.from_now" should be called "expresiveness". Real expresiveness is about what SICP calls "means of abstraction" and "means of combination", not necessarily about having very nice syntax. In general I think those considerations would benefit from distinguishing a bit more between syntax and semantics. As another example, I have been doing Ruby professionally for almost 10 years now, and despite this I have to strongly disagree with the conclusion of this quotation:<p><i>Python is a beautiful, clean language. But the same restrictions that make it nice and clean mean that it’s hard to write beautiful, clean libraries. Ruby, on the other hand, is a complicated, ugly language. But that complexity allows you to write really clean, nice, easy-to-use libraries.</i><p>The Ruby metaprogramming magic makes for really nice syntax, which is what made me choose it over Python all those years ago, but it complicates understanding of what's going on - as I matured as an engineer, maintained a codebase over several years, several times spend long hours debugging issues coming from metaprogramming pitfalls, I shift more and more to the Python approach of building APIs in the simplest possible way, as much as possible sticking to simple function calls and no really fancy metaprogramming just to get a cleaner syntax, e.g. compare Rails has_many :foo with Django's models.ForeignKey(Foo) and the internal implementations of those. Same thing with using "BDD" testing frameworks like RSpec vs. traditional assert stuff, what is the nice syntax worth if tricky bugs hit you where you most want to avoid it, in tests. Libraries like RSpec might be "nice", but they are certainly not "easy-to-use", and I don't think I would call them quite "clean", if I look at their source code.<p>In other words, while clean syntax is luring, in the long run clean and simple semantics is what I think is really important.