Consider that if they know when you wrote your review, they know which your review is, if you then change your review, that's a pretty blatant way of telling them exactly who you are, which might not go over well if they have any sway at all (or if they know someone who might be able to block your progress later).
I don't agree with "unusable" but "academic" probably has some justification.
The fact that it has a "let" keyword does make it "academic" to me. I'm fairly sure we can now have compilers that don't need such hints to be explicitly provided. Rust enjoys its let keyword so much they have a "If let" syntax.
Languages that use random punctuation without providing real benefit could also use a cleanup. Lua with ~= is a good example: Tilde in mathematics means "approximate". In C != means "not equal". So lua's designers can be accused of either never seeing C or deliberately choosing something different. Given that Lua is implemented in C they can't easily claim ignorance.
Archaic and awkward ways of expressing code shouldn't be propagated into new languages unless here is a clear benefit. Have a look at Erlang. Excellent overall but has lots of old warts from yesteryear you wouldn't want in a modern language. Eg look at its string syntax / naming rules. Now compare it to Elixir. Modern. Same VM.
Moving with the times is useful. Future languages shouldn't be adding debris everywhere just to be different.
“let” us a required feature of the Rust grammar; the semantics would be significantly more complex without it, making tooling harder, etc. we didn’t add it for no reason.
It's not a matter of "search for simplicity"; the grammar is just inherently ambiguous without some sort of token in this position. let was taken from OCaml, where a lot of inspiration from Rust came from.
(As a reader, it's also really nice to be able to see "there's a new variable being created here" at a glance. Ambiguity is a human problem as well as a computer problem.)
This is an excellent map for the purpose of it, lifted from a bunch of research (shows the words in each individual language and also which language they originated from)
It does read a bit like what you would hear a "psychic" write in response to a short question, such a long response seems an unreasonably confident response without any more back and forth between the two.
I'm actually a bit surprised so many people here are quickly falling into conclusions about what was and wasn't said when it doesn't seem like it has been explored enough to have anything conclusive determined from it..
But then it's also just an essay meant to speak to certain people and not for everyone in a popular magazine, so eh.
My immediate impression was that both texts are written by the same person. But then again, the "Sloth" section rings way too true for it to be something just set up for analyzing in the latter part.
