Rust's pipes in lambdas come from Ruby, a language that's often regarded as having beautiful syntax.

Rust is objectively not mojibake. The equivalent here would be like using a-z, as Rust's syntax is borrowed from other languages in wide use, not anything particularly esoteric. (Unless you could OCaml as esoteric, which I do believe is somewhat arguable but that's only one thing, the argument still holds for the vast majority of the language.)

> In general, using english words consisting of a-z is easier to read.

I’ve seen COBOL in the wild. No thanks.

But also, imagine reading a math proof written in English words. That just doesn’t work well.

I don't think it's an awful choice, but I'll admit that pipes in lambdas are not my favorite bit of syntax. I'm not a fan of them in Ruby either. I personally prefer JavaScript-ish => for lambdas. But I'm not gonna try to bikeshed one syntax decision made over a decade ago that has relatively minor consequences for other parts of the language. The early Rust core team had different taste than I do essentially, and that's fine.

uuuh I like the pipes even though its my first language with them?

Concise and much clearer to read vs parentheses where you gotta wonder if the params are just arguments, or a tuple, etc. What are you talking about.