Flattening Rust’s learning curve

Rust is wonderful but humbling!

It has a built in coach: the borrow checker!

Borrow checker wouldn't get off my damn case - errors after errors - so I gave in. I allowed it to teach me - compile error by compile error - the proper way to do a threadsafe shared-memory ringbuffer. I was convinced I knew. I didn't. C and C++ lack ownership semantics so their compilers can't coach you.

Everyone should learn Rust. You never know what you'll discover about yourself.

Got recommended learning paths? I tend to prefer follow along adventures via video.

Check out Jon Gjengset.

https://www.youtube.com/@jonhoo

"Rust is wonderful but humbling!"

It's an abstraction and convenience to avoid fiddling with registers and memory and that at the lowest level.

Everyone might enjoy their computation platform of their choice in their own way. No need to require one way nor another. You might feel all fired up about a particular high level language that you think abstracts and deploys in a way you think is right. Not everyone does.

You don't need a programming language to discover yourself. If you become fixated on a particular language or paradigm then there is a good chance you have lost sight of how to deal with what needs dealing with.

You are simply stroking your tools, instead of using them properly.

Wow who pissed in your coffee? he likes rust ok?

And he's telling other people they should like it as well, because he has seen the light.

My gut feeling says that there's a fair bit of Stockholm Syndrome involved in the attachments people form with Rust.

You could see similar behavioral issues with C++ back in the days, but Rust takes it to another level.

> You could see similar behavioural issues with C++ back in the days

I think that it's happened to some degree for almost every computer programming language for a whiles now - first was the C guys enamoured with their NOT Pascal/Fortran/ASM, then came the C++ guys, then Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript/Node, Go, and now Rust.

The vibe coding people seem to be the ones that are usurping Rust's fan boi noise at the moment - every other blog is telling people how great the tool is, or how terrible it is.

I think most of us enamoured with rust are c++ refugees glad the pain is lessened. The tooling including the compiler errors really are great though. I like the simplicity of c, but I would still pick rust for any new project just for the crates and knowing I'll never have to debug a segfault. I like pytorch and matlab fine for prototyping. Not much use for in-between languages like go or c# but I like the ergonomics of them just fine. I don't think it is at all weird for people coming from c++ or even c to like rust and prefer it over those other languages. We have already paid the cost of admission, and it comes with real benefits.

@gerdesj your tone was unnecessarily rude and mean. Part of your message makes a valid point but it is hampered by unnecessary insults. I hope the rest of your day improves from here.

I don’t specifically like Rust itself. And one doesn’t need a programming language to discover themselves.

My experience learning Rust has been that it imposes enough constraints to teach me important lessons about correctness. Lots of people can learn more about correctness!

I’ll concede- “everyone” was too strong; I erred on the side of overly provocative.

> Everyone should learn Rust.

I know this feels like a positive vibe post and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but speaking for myself when someone tells me “everyone should” do anything, alarm bells sound off in my mind, especially when it comes to programming languages.

The compilers maybe not, but static analysers already go a long way, it is a pity that it is still a quixotic battle to make developers adopt them, even if it isn't 100% all the way there.

If it isn't the always hated SecDevOps group of people pushing for the security tooling developers don't care about, at very least on build pipelines, they would keep collecting digital dust.

I wouldn't agree with that. Jon's content is great, but it's really not aimed at beginners, and some of his stuff really gets into the weeds.

It does not teach you any fundamental lessons about correctness. It teaches you lessons about correctness within the framework Rust imposes; that's all

I think everyone should learn many different programming languages, because being exposed to different paradigms helps develop programming skill.

Yeah I agree, I enjoy the process. I don’t think that’s what’s behind “everyone should learn rust” in this case, and many cases. It feels like a “cause”.

Gjengset was very helpful to me as a beginner, and the "Crust of Rust" and "Decrusted" series are aimed at beginners, but mileage varies and there's room for more suggestions if anyone has them.

Yes! 100% this!

For me, programming with C++ was like building castles out of sand. I could never make them tall enough before they would collapse under their own weight.

But with Rust, I leveled up my abilities and built a program larger than I ever thought possible. And for that I'm thankful to Rust for being a language that actually makes sense to me.

"@gerdesj your tone was unnecessarily rude and mean."

"You" are not human.

> Borrow checker wouldn't get off my damn case - errors after errors - so I gave in. I allowed it to teach me

Bondage driven development.