I have been writing a bunch of Rust again over the past couple months, working slowly to implement pieces of what I hope will become the next version of this site.¹ Every time I sit down and work with Rust in earnest for any length of time — ten minutes or ten hours spread across a weekend — I have the same feeling I did when I first started messing with it all the way back in the summer of 2015: This is really good.

It is not that Rust lacks for issues. I have small quibbles and significant complaints. The syntax is not pretty by any stretch. There are still, eight years since 1.0, rough edges in both the language itself and the surrounding ecosystem. And yet: it feels good in a way I find difficult to put into words.

Rust is not the only programming language that makes me feel this way. I have much the same experience working in Elm and Unison. Not so with TypeScript, even if I find it a surpassingly useful and capable tool. Certainly not so with Java nor C♯ nor C++: languages whose contributions I can appreciate but the experience of writing which infuriates me. Not PHP nor JavaScript nor Ruby nor Python. Not even a language which at first blush ought to feel like Rust and Elm, and which I still very much like, such as F♯. Try as I might, I find it impossible to explain exactly what distinguishes the ones I love from those I simply find usable and useful.

There is just something about building a program in Rust which transcends the individual parts of it (good though those individual parts are), or even the mere composition of those parts (generally very wise-composed though their integration is!). It ends up feeling — somehow — elegant and joyful and satisfying.

“Just something about it”: We, amusingly and ironically, end up using the French je ne sais quois because it conveys the sense better. “Just something about it” gets part of the way there, but lacks, well… that je ne sais quois. The language switch itself does something to convey the idea: it is not that we actually cannot put the idea itself into words (clearly we can), so much as that leaving the words untranslated actually conveys the feel of the idea more accurately than the same phrase in one’s native tongue.

I noticed the same like about Leica when using a Q2 last Christmas, and when trying out an M11 in the NYC Leica store last fall: they are very different from Sony or Canon or Nikon. I noticed the same thing about the difference between PostgreSQL and MySQL a decade ago. I noticed it when switching from Windows to macOS — back when it was Mac OS X 10.5 and I adopted it — for reasons unrelated to feel, originally: but the feel of it hooked me immediately. I noticed it about type faces in high school, unable to put up with Times New Roman (and offended, precociously, by Comic Sans).

But at the end of the day, none of that translates. I can explain till I am blue in the face what makes native apps better; if you do not see it, you do not see it. More than that: if you do not feel it, you do not feel it. I see it; I feel it.

This is, in a word, taste: famously difficult to pin down, and even more famously not to be accounted for. This is that experience for which we even reach for another language to try to convey the feeling: of not being able to put the seeing, the feeling, into words. That je ne sais quois.