That's a really weird example to give. You can write unreadable code in any language if you're determined enough

Well, C has such contest, not every language on the other hand.

I'd guess that's mostly because C has been around long enough to be chosen for it and people who are into that kind of thing don't urgently need more than one contest, regardless of language...

Syntax could be less terse and abbreviated, I agree. But it's not unreadable. On the other hand some complain that Rust sometimes is too verbose, so I guess it's some balance.

verbosity is not really the same as nonreadability.

i would say the biggest factor for nonreadability is not being able to chase function calls using simple text search, with as few indirections as possible. proc macros and to a lesser degree traits make that difficult.

Yeah. You can to use LSP to work around it for usage search (which is really helpful), but it's definitely not a human readable case if function name is obscured.

> But it's not unreadable.

That's just because you got used to it ;) (same as with modern C++ really, if you've used C++ long enough you become blind to its problems)

This is completely true.

"Regular" Rust and C++ is fairly readable, but a quick Google for "Higher Kinded Types in Rust" ends up with [0]:

  fn ap<A, B, F: Fn(&A) -> B>(x: &<Self as Plug<F>>::R, arg: &<Self as Plug<A>>::R) -> <Self as Plug<B>>::R
          where Self: Plug<A> + Plug<B> + Plug<F>;

[0] https://hugopeters.me/posts/14/