I don't disagree that making the language small is a great goal and makes the language better. I just think that such a language will not appeal to everyone who enjoyed a large language full of syntactic sugar like Ruby. In fact I very much agree with Go's design goals and see lots of problems with Rust's design choices, at least when considering it for "mondain" work like web dev. However, I cannot get myself excited about Go at all, while I am very excited about Rust. I think it's that Rust, especially coming from Ruby, has interesting new concepts that lead to many rewarding learnings where you change how you reason about some things. When I read about Go, there are no surprises, everything immediately makes sense. All of this is good. It's also boring (in a good way). If I somehow got forced to use one of these languages for a new startup, I'd go with Go. If I had to pick one for playing around with on the weekend, I'd definitely go with Rust.