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It's not satire. It's not happy shiny Rust is perfect nor demonstration of it being easy. Despite what you want it to be.

I'm around average developer of 40ish years, that learned Rust when it was at its hardest.

And yes, going from Java to Rust was hard compared to C#. I needed months to get proficient, compared to mere hours in C#.

Honestly, learning Git was harder than Rust. That took 4-5 months to re-learn it proper and get rid of training wheels.

And it was as hard as learning Haskell/Prolog. Hell, I'm still horrible in Prolog. And people don't complain as much about those two.

People seem to forget that saying "A new programming language should completely change your mental model", otherwise you're learning a new dialect not a language.




> And people don't complain as much about those two

Why do you opt to label plain descriptions of Rust as being difficult as 'complaint'? There's nothing inherently wrong with something being difficult to learn. Au contraire, I would have thought, unless the difficulty is unnecessary, which isn't something I've seen levelled much against Rust. The Rust Foundation has 'Flattening the learning curve' [sic] on its 2024 roadmap: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/04/04/lang-roadm.... Is that a 'complaint', or just a reasonable response to an empirical reality?

The complaint, inasmuch as there is one, is against the loud subsection of the Rust community which swamps any reference to Rust's difficulty with "no it's dead easy! You're just wrong!" (they leave the 'and probably thick' as an obvious inference, stiffly maintaining the rictus).


> Why do you opt to label plain descriptions of Rust as being difficult as 'complaint'?

See article

> [Rust's Ownership and Lifetime rules] come with a steep learning curve and have been repeatedly cited as a barrier to adopting Rust

Complaint, in the sense as this is too hard (aka too foreign) for me to learn. Because it's subjective.

Is Norwegian language difficult to learn? For native speaker - no. For European, probably not that much. For a Chinese, probably yes.

For example Prolog is nigh impossible for me to learn and non-ironicaly harder than Rust.




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