C doesn't scare me, but having used both dynamic languages like Ruby/Python and static languages with type inferencing and reasonably robust type systems (e.g., ML-family languages, Haskell), I find C-like languages that require a lot of type ceremony despite having fairly anemic type systems (and this is even more true of the whole C++/C#/Java family of static OO languages) to be quite annoying -- I don't feel like the type system is working for me, but that I'm doing extra work to make things easier for the compiler -- while Rust seems to be in a fairly reasonable place for a statically-typed language.