Mark Rushakoff

Because it's cargo culting. The periodic table looks the way it does because it's about the relationships between the different elements organized spatially on the page. Because of that, it also lets us predict elements we haven't discovered yet! Amazing!

There's really no reason that the relationship between typography, dessert, vegetables, google apis look anything like the relationship between the elements. If it did, we'd really be on to something!

But! If the relationships between google apis isn't at all like the elements, what would it look like? And even more interesting, if there are missing spaces, that means there are google apis not yet written that we can look forward to!

http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/

Is an example where someone did a periodic table that tried to use space as a way to convey information about the relationship between the perl operators. Notice how it looks nothing like the PTofE. It has its own structure because the relationship between perl operators is different than the relationship between the elements.

Those of us that are sticklers about this feel so, probably because we find the beauty of the actual meaning behind the structure of the periodic table much much more interesting and beautiful than any joke you can make from it.

Sometimes, jokes are funny because they're the truth that no one wants to say. Like when Chris Rock says, "[When listening to your woman], you've always got to throw in 'told you that bitch crazy',…

I'd assert that the "periodic table of types"[^1] radically overstates the complexity of the Rust type system, largely because of the rampant misuse of the "periodic table" as a means of presenting groups of things. A "periodic table" of (for example) food items or Perl operators tends to have a bunch of distinct elements in its cells arranged by loose groupings[^2], whereas the Rust periodic table (like the periodic table of elements, but unlike other pop-culture periodic tables) has cells whose contents are for the most part[^3] a function of their row and column.

Tabular nomenclature aside: Rust has values and two kinds of pointers, and a handful of built-in types, and you can have pointers to those types. While the semantics of the pointers are unusual, I don't think that makes it that much more complicated. It should also be noted that many of the proposed language changes make said table even more regular (e.g. replacing the [T] syntactic sugar for vectors with a more conventional Vec<T>.)

Rust is in some ways complicated, and I'll grant that a beginner to the language will likely curse the borrow-checker more than a few times. But I don't think Rust is nearly as complicated as it is sometimes reputed to be.

[^1]: http://cosmic.mearie.org/2014/01/periodic-table-of-rust-types/

[^2]: http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/ is an egregious example.

[^3]: There are exceptions (e.g. the closure types) but they are few and easily memorized.

I will reference to Steve Yegge's rant on Perl. It has a lot of examples on Perl operators that are overloaded: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl - - and how their man pages isn't a big help.

While other languages of course have their special syntax, Perl is very extreme in this regard. This is best illustrated by the following diagram of special Perl operators (where most of them are only found and used in Perl):

http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/blog/code/PeriodicTable.pdf