this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Programming
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The Rust community is a very diverse group of people with many different opinions. It is not a universal truth that the Rust community believes Rust to be an awful first language. I've known plenty of people who started their careers with Rust. I started my career with Rust, too. The complaint with difficulty adapting to the borrow checker has been irrelevant since the 2021 edition of Rust. The borrow checker has become smarter about rearranging borrows and automatically tagging lifetimes in most cases. The remaining constraints that the compiler enforces are also hard requirements to learn when developing software in any other language. The same practices equally apply to all software. For example, mutating an array while iterating it in Python or JavaScript will lead to unexpected behavior. Python and JavaScript's lack of a proper type system causes a lot of software to explode at runtime when you think inputs are always X but suddenly in one case it happens to be Y.
You don't need to take my word for it. Google the topic and go through all the discussions. Even the ones in Rust's own forum get mixed responses, and that community is by its very nature very partial towards Rust.
Also, framing the discussion around newbies learning Rust as a first language is a strawman. The question is not whether if someone without any prior experience in programming can or cannot make and effort and write code in Rust. The question is which language to learn.
There are many programming languages to pick and choose from, and some are renowned to be very beginner friendly. Rust is not one of them.
If you want to make a case for Rust, it's up to you to prove that Rust is a better language to take first steps than any other programming language around. In my personal opinion, it is simply not possible to claim that Rust is better for this particular usecase than quite a sizable set of programming languages, including but not limited to Python. If you want to claim Rust is better suited then you need to make a case for it, and that is a challenging thing to pull off.
I don't need Google to tell me what I already know since writing software in Rust for the last 8 years. It was your argument that Rust is not suitable for newbies. So if you want to change the topic to what language a person should learn, then Rust is most definitely at the every top. It's a life-changing experience that significantly boosts your programming skill once learned. There's a reason why it's been the most loved programming language on Stack Overflow for seven consecutive years. Not because it's hard, but because it's enjoyable to learn and use. The patterns and techniques that Rust teaches are useful in every language.