Syntax is in a large part what people are used to. Which is trivial to change by just using the thing for a while and getting used to the different syntax. But syntax is only part of a language. The tooling, documentation, error messages, and general feed back are all IMO much nicer in rust than C++. It is also easier to people new to programming or used to other languages to get into than C++ is, even including the syntax into that.
C++ was one of the first languages I learnt - and now after not using it for years I cannot stand its syntax.
You may be right, I don’t have enough experience talking to new programmers in order to comment on that part specifically, but I do think a sizeable portion of existing C++ devs who don’t want to use rust exist, and this may now be a problem moving forward, especially if the C++ committee keeps dragging their feet and never adopt any new safety extensions.
Personally I think the swift syntax is much more familiar and friendly to existing C++ devs, but its popularity does not seem anywhere near rust’s level for some reason, but maybe now that a truly cross-platform version has been released, it might gain some traction… maybe.
but I do think a sizeable portion of existing C++ devs who don’t want to use rust exist
That may be true. But out of that pool of people it seemed that very very few wanted to work on the fish project. So it was not helping them much at all. The is a vastly larger pool of people that don’t want to learn C++ and some of those may be willing to pick up rust. It would not take much for that to out number the number of C++ devs that want to work on fish that also don’t want to learn rust. Given there are not a huge amount of contributors that regularly contribute to it according to their announcement blog post.
Syntax is in a large part what people are used to. Which is trivial to change by just using the thing for a while and getting used to the different syntax. But syntax is only part of a language. The tooling, documentation, error messages, and general feed back are all IMO much nicer in rust than C++. It is also easier to people new to programming or used to other languages to get into than C++ is, even including the syntax into that.
C++ was one of the first languages I learnt - and now after not using it for years I cannot stand its syntax.
You may be right, I don’t have enough experience talking to new programmers in order to comment on that part specifically, but I do think a sizeable portion of existing C++ devs who don’t want to use rust exist, and this may now be a problem moving forward, especially if the C++ committee keeps dragging their feet and never adopt any new safety extensions.
Personally I think the swift syntax is much more familiar and friendly to existing C++ devs, but its popularity does not seem anywhere near rust’s level for some reason, but maybe now that a truly cross-platform version has been released, it might gain some traction… maybe.
That may be true. But out of that pool of people it seemed that very very few wanted to work on the fish project. So it was not helping them much at all. The is a vastly larger pool of people that don’t want to learn C++ and some of those may be willing to pick up rust. It would not take much for that to out number the number of C++ devs that want to work on fish that also don’t want to learn rust. Given there are not a huge amount of contributors that regularly contribute to it according to their announcement blog post.