It's hilarious to me that people talk about "ugly" as if their opinions are objective.

I found Rust unpleasant to look at for the first two weeks of learning it, and now that I've been using it professionally for three years I loathe when I need to read code in other languages.

No other language can rival Rust in showing the exact information needed to understand the code

never too much and never too little

while being concise, correct, and handling all edge cases.

You can be more concise in other languages, but it will come the loss of handling every little possible bug. You can be prettier in other languages, but it will come at the price of adding a lot of useless boilerplate.

Of course there are cases where Rust can be verbose or confusing, but that's when you're doing very esoteric things that would be just as confusing in other languages.

Like any opinion on aesthetics, how someone feels about the prettiness of a language will have far more to do with familiarity than with any objective metrics.

Yeah, I was gonna say, error handling easily makes up 80+% of the code paths, and depending on whether you're building a library or service or script etc., different strategies are most suitable for how to deal with those code paths.

In a script, you often just want it to crash. In a library, you want to make these code paths matchable, in case the user cares why something failed. And then you have the awkward in-between, which is that 99% of your application codebase will be used by your main-function like a library, but you don't want to spend as much effort on error handling for that as a proper library does, in particular also because you know what all consumers of your application-library need to know.

So, it's kind of multiple different problems, with overlap, and people are hoping for one easy solution to cover all these problems.