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Discussion on: Welcome Thread - v20

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Betsy Haibel

Rust is a pretty hardcore first language! I've been learning it on and off for a year and it's only now that I'm starting to feel like I'm getting the hang of it. Then again, I think that learning it as an experienced dev might be harder in some ways -- I kept on wanting field ownership to work like attribute ownership in Ruby, and oh boy does it not.

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Ben Lovy • Edited

I think you hit the nail on the head - it's a function of what you're familiar with. I disagree with the notion that Rust is inherently more difficult to learn than anything else - it just pushes the complexity up front instead of just letting you write something broken anyway and having to deal with it yourself. You need to learn to do it "right" before you can do it at all, but get over the hump once and you're good to go. I think it's easier to use because you have this fantastic compiler showing you what you're doing wrong. There's much less trepidation around trying something outside your comfort zone because you know rustc has your back. I'm now surprised when other languages let me do things I know rustc would have a problem with and it's a pretty good indicator I might (but not necessarily) need to rethink my implementation.