> Going to rust directly has been a very frustrating experience and made me give up.
IMHO, you could learn Rust as a first PL by treating it as a functional programming language with a focus on purity, like a twist on ML or F#. The borrow checker rules and things like the String/&str distinction follow naturally from that POV. Then learn how "interior mutability" is used to enable more C-like procedural programming with shared mutable state.
I feel that by starting with FP, for example by starting with something close to ML in syntax and concepts, you cut yourself from too much of the programming world as everything else feels completely foreign and weird. But I get your point, you can approach it from the other side and also develop your intuition this way.
IMHO, you could learn Rust as a first PL by treating it as a functional programming language with a focus on purity, like a twist on ML or F#. The borrow checker rules and things like the String/&str distinction follow naturally from that POV. Then learn how "interior mutability" is used to enable more C-like procedural programming with shared mutable state.