If you only write code which you yourself will read and maintain, then you should definitely do whatever you feel works best for you and matches your way of thinking.
Well written code is obviously better than badly written code. But why assume the functional-style is better written than the idiomatic Python? I think a good developer understand the context they work in rather than try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I wouldn't like to maintain Haskell code written by someone who thinks everything should look like Python. And vice-versa.
I believe it started as a way to model real-world object. Simula was designed for simulations. But OO turned out to be useful for much more. The simulation use case mostly live on in tutorial and examples, spreading confusion to beginners.
But I also think the "message passing" metaphor has outlived its usefulness the same way. A caller does not need to know how the callee is implemented. Sure, but this is the same in any language with functions/procedure, this is not something specific for OO. The idea of message passing is a bit deeper, for example that the client does not even know it is calling a method. It sends a message, and the object answers, even if it is just by throwing an error that the message is not supported. This is how Smalltalk and (I think) Ruby works, but not at all how a statically types language like C# works. And it is not how Python works either. In Python you obtain a method reference from an object and then invoke it. So if you apply the message passing metaphor, your are actually passing the message to the method rather than the object itself. Which I think is just a confusing way to describe a method call.
I like removing superfluous punctuation, but if parentheses are removed from method signatures than they should also be removed from invocations, which in turn comes with its own set of readability issues. I'm not a fan of the $ operator in Haskell, for example.
It is somewhat unfair to compare this to Python, since a lot of the simplicity in Python comes from the semantics (dynamically typed, garbage collected and so on). Rust need to express all this information (types, lifetimes etc.), so it will necessarily be more dense. The question is if this information could be expressed in a more readable syntax. This might be possible, but I would like to see a suggestion of how.
I guess the signature could be made more readable by using a few type aliases. The hardest part to read is the nested types.
I'm with you on the macro syntax, it is very hard to read. It is not easy to create a readable macro syntax though. All languages I know have hard-to-read macros, so this is not yet a solved problem.
So again a pet hypothesis which can explain both rising and falling IQ. So what observation could theoretically disprove this hypothesis?
Note that you can state exactly the opposite hypothesis and still claim the numbers support it. The use of gaming consoles and smartphones improve IQ, but this effect have maxed out in Scandinavia.
Django is not going to be rewritten in Julia. Neither is Linux going to be rewritten in Python. Different languages have different domains. Some of these comments seem to think all languages is competing in the same domain as if Rust is a direct competitor to Julia or JavaScript.
Rust will not steal Pythons dinner, they are used for completely different domains. The comment was saying that Rust might be a realistic alternative to C/C++/Fortran for modules which are not written in Python.
Good point about the learning curve. I don't think Rust is especially difficult overall, but you need to understand a lot before you get anywhere. Haskell kind of have the same problem, where you need to understand advanced features like monads before you can even write hello world.
Comparing Haskell to JavaScript is silly - JavaScript is popular because it is the only option in the browser. It has noting to do with the quality of the language itself. If VBScript had won, everyone would be using that. If Netscape had decided to use Scheme or Haskell as the scripting language, this is what everyone would be using.
Rust is competing in the space of C and C++, it is not competing against Java or Python. People are not gong to write operating systems in Python because it feels more productive. For simpler desktop applications you may have a point, but heavyweights like Word or Photoshop are written in C++ and Rust may be a realistic migration. JavaScript or Python is not.
PEP-8 (more than 15 years old) recommend spaces, so unless you are deliberately looking for a fight, the question is settled.
Autoindent is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in Python in the first place. Having two independent representations for blocks, one for human readers (indent) and one for compilers (braces), leads to nasty bugs when they get out of sync. Autoindent is a tool to keep them in sync. In Python there is a single representation, so nothing can get out of sync.
You will see a lot of caricatures and ethnic stereotypes in Asterix. Primarily of European and Mediterranean nationalities though. A lot of the stories are Asterix and Obelix traveling to some region and all the stereotypes of that region is played up. If you are uncomfortable with this form of comedy, Asterix is probably not for you.
The Icelandic sagas certainly also portrays emotions. The characters are very much driven by emotions. The point is it is displayed entirely through their actions, not by internal monologue or direct description of their mental states like in 19th century literature.
Ancient lyrical poetry like Sappho on the other hand is direct expression of feelings. Ecclesiastes (in the Bible) is a monologue about the narrators feelings and mental state.
So it seems to more like a question of genre and narrative style rather than some kind of mental development of humanity. The sagas are not fiction, they are supposed to be about actual historical figures and events. You don't know what a historical figure actually thought and felt, only what they said and did. There are some examples in the sagas where characters directly express their feeling through poetry.
I think the "I'm going to get downvoted for this..."-baiting leads to a lot of reflexive upvotes and downvotes regardless of the actual content of the comment.