this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Almost any language is OK, but Rust is just so, so fucking ugly
Almost any language is ok but some ecosystems make me want to turn into a murder hobo (looking at you, JavaScript).
Hard disagree. Super beautiful.
what? what part of rust is ugly?
Maybe they're confusing the literal name with the language? Idk.
I grew up on Perl and holy fuck... Rust is fine.
I'm learning Perl - purely for fun - and yeah... it's a little funky.
Perl is ugly but great. It's like shell scripting with a more solid programming language. I'd never use it outside of simple scripts in my os, but whenever I do use it it's very fun. Anyway, yeah, rust looks fine to me. Maybe they are not very experienced with it? I know some of my programs used to have lines with just x.unwrap().unwrap().unwrap() or whatever, which is not pretty.
Enums and nested blocks. I understand the importance of
OptionandResult, but it's fucking infuriating when I have to check and destructure the result of every function call and either bubble the result up the stack from six levels of nestedif letblocks or risk Cloudflaring my program by using.unwrap(). And while I like being able to extract a return value from anif...elseexpression, the structure gets really convoluted when multipleifandmatchblocks are nested (of course each one returning a value), and it gets completely fucked once closures are introduced.I like Rust, but calling it pretty is delusional.
Sum types with associated values are worth it
Learn how to use enum error types, how error bubbling works, and how to convert between Options and Results.
It's Rust you are talking about, not Go.
I like to use
unwrap_or()to define fallback values. TheOptionAPI is quite expressive.I'll start using this one
FORTRAN isn't a beauty either.
And Python is strange as hell with its mandatory tabs.
You can use spaces in Python.
Two, three or four spaces? If you answer wrong I'll never forgive you
collapsed inline media
Whatever your place defines as a standard. I’ve seen ugly code in C, JavaScript, Java, etc., that uses them all over the place because they’re not mandatory.
If you don’t have consistent indenting, your code looks like copy/paste from several sources; but if you do have consistent indenting, then the indenting of Python is a non-issue.
Per the Linux kernel coding style:
I’m rather partial to five myself but only when I’m feeling fancy.
Yes
Indentation-driven control flow is one of the most cursed things ever invented, excluding things explicitly designed to inflict pain or death.
White space sensitive languages are evil.
Haskell has the choice of both indentation based and brackets for things like
doblocks, but most people use indentation based cause it's the norm and looks cleanerList comprehensions are much stranger than tabs vs spaces. There are very very very few languages that use them, and python’s is by far the worst out of the popular ones.
Skill issue. Once you learn them they are quite fun.
The concept of a list comprehenshion is sinple but syntax is awful, as if Yoda was writing a for loop. "x for x in y it is, hmm yes".
I can actually see where this is coming from, as I found Rust hard to read when I started out. I do really like Rust for reference, but I do agree Rust is hard to read for someone that has not learned it.
For example:
return statements that are implicit just because the semicolon isn't there. Even better if they occur inside a if block or something like that. Very hard to understanding when you don't know the syntax rules.
Lambda functions, especially when using move semantics too. They are quite simple, but if you don't know the meaning, it's more arcane characters. Especially when this is used inside lots of chained methods, and maybe a multi-line function in the lambda.
A lot for the if let x =... type of stataments are tough the first time around. Same for match statements.
Defining types for use with function::() and such.
Lifetimes, especially when they are all named a, b, c etc. It quickly gets messy, especially when combined with generics or explicitly defined types.
Macros, though not entry level rust to begin with, they are really cumbersome to decode.
None of these are sins of Rust, but for new people they are a hill to climb, and often hard to just "get" based on previous programming experience and reading the code. Rust can be really hard to approach because of these things. This happens in other languages too, but I do feel Rust has a particularly large amount of new concepts or ways to do something. And this is on top of learning lifetimes and borrow semantics.
This is the most sober take in this thread. I was bothered by all these things you mentioned for the first two weeks of using the language. I begrudgingly accepted them for the following two months because I felt the benefits of the language were worth it. Now all of these things feel natural and I don't give them a second thought.
Go look at that Lisp kojumbo then tell me Rust is ugly.
Actually unreadable.
Maybe Emacs has fried my brain, but that is perfectly readable. Common Lisp has one of the most advanced object systems around, so yea you can write hard to read stuff if you want
One of the reasons i find it so hard to use non-Rust languages is how ugly they typically are by comparison. "fn" instead of "function" is such a great example of saving key presses where they're most needed. And you get very used to seeing compact abbreviations. Idk if that's what you're talking about though.
Rust:
C:
With Rust you safe 1 char, and gain needing to skip a whole line to see what type something is.
So that's why people like C-style return types. That actually makes a lot of sense. I do too now.