One thing I wished was on this list, but wasn't, is syntax. I love many syntax decisions Rust made, but I wish Rust hasn't borrowed so much syntax from C/C++. The syntax of these languages was designed under (for todays standards) weird keyboard and encoding constraints and many choices are just odd.

To give you a few examples:

- = instead of == for equality would have been the natural choice

- := for assignment is similar enough to what is used in math for definition, so that languages like Pascal use it

- <> for inequality is something SQL got right

Smaller things that bug me are the ubiquity of the double colon (::) and the weird mixture of snake case and camel case conventions.

And not to leave the wrong impression, I think Rust got many things very right. My personal highlights are:

- -> for the return value

- concise keywords like `fn`

- `where` for constraints

In general more Algol/Pascal and Haskell - less BCPL and C/C++.

I think its cppfront that is taking the approach of `:=` being a declaration with the type being inferred (ie shorthand for `: Type =`). Reading up on that has made me the most ok with applying this to functions (which I see coming up more these days) but I think i still prefer functions having a more distinct look as I process them differently when reading. Now, cppfront's approach to types I think is bonkers, making critical details hard to find except maybe through convention.

https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

> <> for inequality is something SQL got right

Maybe I'm not recognizing the biases of my own learning background but this never reads right to me vs "not equal" / `!=`.

> - concise keywords like `fn`

In other discussions, it sounded like Graydon had an upper limit of 4 characters for keywords

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13oemrg/question_abou...

For me, I had a "whoosh" moment for `fn` and always thought it a weird abbreviation, completely overlooking "fn" keys on laptops.