I think the thing that puts me off the most is the lifetime specifiers:
let foo:'static str = "foo";
Whenever I see an apostrophe, my mind defaults to frantically searching for its counterpart at the end of the string they're enclosing. Just like for parentheses; imagine how confusing it would be if ' would have been ( instead.
This particular convention is inherited from the ML family, where it has been very popular for a very long time.
For what it's worth, there are many cases even in the natural language where ' is not supposed to have a "closing" counterpart - indeed, the "it's" in this very sentence is one such example. Then you have the use of ' to denote feet and minutes of arc. Now, technically these are all actually different symbols, with their own Unicode codepoints etc - but in practice, people use ' for all of them, and it doesn't seem to be confusing anyone. You could treat the ' in Rust as something along these lines.
> Whenever I see an apostrophe, my mind defaults to frantically searching for its counterpart at the end of the string they're enclosing.
In fairness, you should never be searching for matching apostrophe. Single quote, maybe. The fact that it's an apostrophe should also trigger that it might have something to do with possession... (or that something was omitted).
Granted, lifetime syntax has no analogue in the languages the comment I was replying to mentioned. That doesn't seem to be enough to qualify as "so different" though. But maybe it is?
