zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
I actually liked @T because you would pronounce it as "At T".

You could say "The address at T". Curious why people hated it, I might be missing something.

>>ramon1+J3m
@T had a number of issues. The first was just that it was weird. People tend to not like weird things. Rust developed a reputation for "that language with a bunch of pointer types that are all weird."

The real reason it was removed in the end was just that it elevated a library concept into syntax. Today's Arc<T>/Rc<T> split isn't really possible in an @T world, for example. Shared ownership is a good concept, but you don't need special syntax to indicate it.

>>stevek+lvm
> The first was just that it was weird.

Compared to what?

>>MangoT+3xn
People just found the trio of &T, @T, and ~T to be strange and confusing. Lots of Perl comparisons, many people really dislike punctuation of any kind, it seems.

Most languages only have one kind of pointer, and they tend to use & and * as operators for them.

>>stevek+tzn
Sure, but people also find pointers and references confusing (& certainly their distinction). Literally all programming is considered weird if you talk to the right person.

I would argue as a rule of thumb, anyone who focuses on syntax over semantics has little to contribute until they write ten thousand lines in the language. Perl is a great example of how it still fails after this test passes. Rust feels a lot more like java and c++ now, and not in a good way. It could have done more to improve on basic readability than where we ended up, and people still bitch about basic tenets of the language like "lifetimes" and "not being enough like java".

>>MangoT+EDn
You can stand on principle, or you can recognize that semantics is important, and syntax isn’t really, and therefore, accepting feedback about syntax is a fine thing to compromise on.

I also agree that you can’t listen to everyone, but this feedback was loud and pervasive.