Rust is amazing, I truly believe a large number of people are intimidated by it and so go out of their way to shit on it and pretend like it's only for some niche IOT device... when it's just as easy to write out a full crud application in Rust as any other language at this point.
I wish extreme Rust solipsists would stop blankly stating as a fact that working in Rust is 'easy' just because they find it so. If you do, good for you, but your experience is not universal. Many don't.
I find Rust extremely difficult and slow to work with. It takes me a long, long time to get anything working at all. Easily 5x more than any other language I've used (and that's many, and a good handful professionally), and I've been learning Rust for over a year.
Figures are hard to come by of course, but anecdotally I'm the only person in my circle who's continued using Rust. All the others have dropped out because they just find it too hard to get anything done in. Not sure if this is true, but I heard on a podcast the other day that one of the big surveys showed Rust to have the biggest learning drop-out rate of any mainstream programming language. That wouldn't surprise me, and comports well with Rust being the 'most loved' (people tend to love skills they have gained with much effort!).
No I was half-listening and think it was mentioned in a loose way, and I think I'm conflating it with some other mention in a different recent podcast so that's more than a few levels of looseness.
I've just scrubbed back through - the podcast was https://syntax.fm/show/571/supper-club-rust-in-action-with-t..., which follows the pleasing practise of providing chapters (yay). It was Tim McNamara speaking from about 12'40": what he actually said was that about half of Rust learners who do drop out fall away because of the purported difficulty of the language. Very different from my faux summary so apologies for the grievous misrepresentation.
I still find Rust as hard to use as others I've spoken to do though. I'm kind of keeping at it for reasons specific to projects I have in mind, as well as a certain dense stubbornness.
Thank you! It’s all good, I just hadn’t heard that before and was curious how it was figured out! The Rust Project has long acknowledged that Rust is tough to learn. That’s why I got to have a job back then! And there’s still new good work going on in that space. I don’t think the nut has been fully cracked yet.
> there’s still new good work going on in that space
Is there anything there someone like me (ie. having difficulty with Rust) might usefully contribute to? I'm a little overwhelmed right now trying to keep a roof over my head, but am compiling a list of things I might like to help with when the current storm has passed.
I don't know what's good to help with and what isn't, because I haven't been involved with Rust development for a pretty long time at this point.
Personally I think contributions work best when you're trying to solve a pain that you personally have or at least have some sort of connection to, so I'd encourage you to consider what/how/why you struggled to learn, and then try to fix that. I know it's vague, but it's the best I've got right now!
Hey Steve, I was referring to the official Rust Survey in the podcast interview. I'll track down a specific link, but the stat comes from one of the PDFs rather than the analysis blog posts. I'm having difficulty finding it currently.
