By making the language simple you can easily implement your own parser. This opens up the ability to write native parsers in other languages, say vimscript. By keeping it super simple there -are- no corner-cases.
There are many benefits to this (like the formatters etc that others have alluded to) from things like IDE integration (imagine lifetime elision visualisation, invalid move notifications, etc) static analysis tools and more. None of these tools then need to be written in Rust. It also means it's easier to implement support in pre-existing multi-language tools.
Don't underestimate the necessity of a simple parseable grammar. Besides, people have endured much worse slights in syntax (see here Erlang).
The vim formatters/syntax checkers I've used that actually try to parse the language - other than Lisp, which is the limiting case - are generally terrible. They all miss some corner case that makes them useless for daily work, since they generate too many false-positives on real code.
The ones I actually use all call out to the actual compiler - Python, Go, or Clang for C++.
Just because people write their own parsers doesn't make it a good idea. It may've been necessary when most compilers were proprietary and people didn't have an idea how to make a good API for a parser. But now - just don't do it. You'll save both you and your users a lot of pain.
By making the language simple you can easily implement your own parser. This opens up the ability to write native parsers in other languages, say vimscript. By keeping it super simple there -are- no corner-cases.
There are many benefits to this (like the formatters etc that others have alluded to) from things like IDE integration (imagine lifetime elision visualisation, invalid move notifications, etc) static analysis tools and more. None of these tools then need to be written in Rust. It also means it's easier to implement support in pre-existing multi-language tools.
Don't underestimate the necessity of a simple parseable grammar. Besides, people have endured much worse slights in syntax (see here Erlang).