Flattening Rust’s learning curve

Sure, C++ has a more complex spec, nobody can argue against that.

Complex is the wrong word. Baffling is a better word. Or counterintuitive, or cumbersome. If “easy enough for someone with experience in C++, OCaml, Haskell, and F#” were the same thing as “not hard” then I don’t think this debate would come up so frequently.

What you call "baffling", I call "different". Being different doesn't mean it's "complex" or even "hard" (in isolation), but it can be baffling, in the same way that driving on the other side of the road for the first time can feel baffling (but doesn't mean it's "wrong").

Of course, this is very subjective. For someone who only knows python or javascript at a superficial level, Rust may seem out of reach. But if you're ok with the most common programming paradigms, I don't find Rust baffling.

I mean, you can't expect to learn a new language in a few days, it'll always take a bit of work. My feeling is that people complaining of the language being hard aren't putting the effort.

My experience is that Rust is a relatively small language which doesn't introduce a lot of new concepts. The syntax is quite intuitive, and the compiler super helpful. The borrower checker was the only new thing for me. I'm not an expert at all, but my experience is that after spending 2 weeks full-time reading books and experimenting, I was able to work professionally with the language without feeling too much friction.

On the other hand, after spending much more time on C++, I don't feel really comfortable with the language.

C++ is a huge and complex language. I worked in it, on and off, from 2002 through 2014 or so and never really felt comfortable, either. Everyone seems to use their own dialect.

(I'm working on learning Rust on my free time.)

My feeling is that Java / C++ / Python / Javascript are all really the same language when you get down to it. Rust borrows from OCaml more than an other popular imperative languages (the first implementatoin by Graydon Hoare was in OCaml, so the inspirations abound), and therefore it really is quite different to a lot of devs who have never seen the functional paradigm. Good rust is written as a mix of imperative with a strong functional flavoring. Bad Rust is when you try to do everything by mutating arrays over iteration as you would do in imperative languages.

For me, I almost never write "for loops" and "if statements" in Rust; instead I use "functional iterators" and "match expressions", which interface with the borrow checker more nicely.

For example, iterating over an array while modifying it is a common pattern in imperative languages that compiles fine but often causes hard to reason about logic errors during runtime. In Rust, such a thing would cause compile time errors. So instead you rewrite to be more functional, it compiles, and then the magic is it just works, which is a common property of functional languages like Haskell.

IMO a lot of the consternation about the cost of the learning curve is because developers haven't realized once you get past it, the benefit is your code more often is just correct and therefore you run into fewer runtime bugs. In other languages you get the code compiling faster, but then you spend a great deal of time debugging things at runtime which you didn't anticipate at compile time.