this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I've just started learning Rust, mostly by experimenting with winapi since that what's I'm mostly going to use it for anyway, but this finally explains why I had so much trouble with trying to intuitively winging it. I've skimmed through the Rust book once, but judging by this article it's no wonder I was mostly wrestling the compiler.
Looks like I have to go back to the drawing board. I understand why is Rust doing it, and I'm sure that once I finally get used to it, it's going to be a way smoother experience, but maan, this is the first language I couldn't just figure out in an hour. It's a frustrating learning experience, but I also see why it's neccessary and love it for that.
I've had a few challenging moments for sure but I'm really loving it. I come javascript mostly with a fair amount of ruby experience, and C++ dating back to college. C++ was by far more difficult to learn, but this was like 15 years ago and learning resources have changed drastically since then. To me Rust feels like low level Ruby. I think it takes some good DX cues from Ruby.
I've been mostly working in C# for the past few years (and most of my life), and the only C++ experience I have is from college, so it's getting some using to. And that's what I was getting at - thanks to college, where I was forced to really learn (or at least, understand and be able to use) a wide range of drastically different languages, from Lisp through Bash, Pharo, Prolog, to Java and C#, that when I have to write something in a language I don't know, it's usually similar to at least one of them and I always could figure it out intuitively.
With Rust, even though it has an amazing compiler, I'm struggling - probably because of the borrowing and overly careful error handling being concepts I've never had to deal with to get a MVP code working. Sure, that probably means that the code wasn't error-proof, which is exactly what Rust forces you to do and which is amazing, but it makes it a lot harder to just write a single script without prior knowledge when you have to.
I hope they are teaching Rust at universities now, we definitely didn't have it 8 years ago, which is a shame.