←back to thread

Flattening Rust’s learning curve

(corrode.dev)
452 points birdculture | 2 comments | 13 May 25 22:25 UTC | HN request time: 1.02s | source
Show context
toprerules ◴[14 May 25 15:24 UTC] No.43985668[source]▶
As a systems programmer I found Rust relatively easy to learn, and wonder if the problem is non-systems programmers trying to learn their first systems language and having it explicitly tell them "no, that's dangerous. no, that doesn't make sense". If you ask a front end developer to suddenly start writing C they are going to create memory leaks, create undefined behavior, create pointers to garbage, run off the end of an array, etc. But they might "feel" like they are doing great because there program compiles and sort of runs.

If you have already gotten to the journeyman or mastery experience level with C or C++ Rust is going to be easy to learn (it was for me). The concepts are simply being made explicit rather than implicit (ownership, lifetimes, traits instead of vtables, etc).

replies(2): >>43987347 #>>43989311 #
1. SyrupThinker ◴[14 May 25 17:50 UTC] No.43987347[source]▶
I think this is good insight, and I would extend this further to “coming from a less strict language to a very strict one”.

As someone who self-learned Rust around 1.0, after half a year of high school level Java 6, I’ve never had the problems people (even now) report with concepts like the ownership system. And that despite Rust 1.0 being far more restrictive than modern Rust, and learning with a supposedly harder to understand version of “The Book”.

I think it’s because I, and other early Rust learners I’ve talked to about this, had little preconceived notions of how a programming language should work. Thus the restrictions imposed by Rust were just as “arbitrary” as any other PL, and there was no perceived “better” way of accomplishing something.

Generally the more popular languages like JS or Python allow you to mold the patterns you want to use sufficiently, so that they fit into it. At least to me with languages like Rust or Haskell, if you try to do this with too different concepts, the code gets pretty ugly. This can give the impression the PL “does not do what you need” and “imposes restrictions”.

I also think that this goes the other way, and might just be a sort of developed taste.

replies(1): >>43987712 #
2. steveklabnik ◴[14 May 25 18:29 UTC] No.43987712[source]▶
For whatever it's worth, I used to do a lot of teaching, and I have a similar hunch to

> I think it’s because I, and other early Rust learners I’ve talked to about this, had little preconceived notions of how a programming language should work. Thus the restrictions imposed by Rust were just as “arbitrary” as any other PL, and there was no perceived “better” way of accomplishing something.