> To me Rust looks much like C++ with a twist and people rightfully complain about C++ often :)
But would you put C++ next to Perl in terms of difficulty reading? I wouldn't have thought they were particularly close. (In terms of normal code at least, not the implementations of ultra-generic templates.)
The difficulty of reading Perl is probably overclaimed and overrepresented. Let's not forget that we are comparing a pretty darn low-level language to a fairly high-level one.
And regarding design principles, I think the comparison is clearly on point. These are languages where the motto is basically "if you can't do it (if you can do it but it's perceived too long that also counts) then the language needs to be horizontally extended to account for this use case".
My vague impression was that Rust is still a (significant) simplification over C++. (Ada is a funny case because it seems to be deliberately designed to be hard to read and hard to write, overall a pain in the arse, in the spirit of "if you never reach flow, you will always be very focused", I guess.)
But would you put C++ next to Perl in terms of difficulty reading? I wouldn't have thought they were particularly close. (In terms of normal code at least, not the implementations of ultra-generic templates.)