Sure, "let foo = bar" is one of the worst things any language can do.

Let is redundant, that's what the = is for. Unless it's meant to be equivalent to 'var' or 'auto', in which case it's even worse.

Let contains no information, it's pointless clutter that replaced something that did contain vital information. Let tells you the next symbol is a variable. What type? Who knows and who cares, it's a variable, deal with it. C marks a symbol as a variable by using its type name.

I mean, this was a very large part of why Perl is so miserable. I will never understand why people choose to implement this in modern languages.

Anyway, variables and parameters without explicit, visible type information is a hard no for me. I took a sniff of a couple rust projects, saw this mess, and decided that rust is not for me. I don't care about all the other magical benefits that cure all my ails, this feature is a dealbreaker, full stop.

`let` defines a new binding, as opposed to changing the value of an existing binding. You can't remove `let` to keep only `=` because it has a different use case.

Not indicating the type is idiomatic in Rust, but you can annotate it:

    let commit_message: String = repo.head().peel_to_commit().ok()?.message()?.into();

Here this is useful to specify the type `into` should convert to. However, if rewritten as:

    let commit_message = repo.head().peel_to_commit().ok()?.message()?.to_string();

Then it is useless because we're already specifying the type of the variable by using `to_string`.

Note that IDEs are displaying type hints anyway (without you having to type them), so you don't have to suffer if walking through a codebase where people are annotating their types too little for comfort