From the article:
> These rules may sound complicated, but really, they are about understanding the fundamentals of how a computer works.
... and from the post that the article links to:
> Understanding String vs &str implies an understanding of the ownership system, which implies an understanding of the lifetime system. That probably means that you’ve been exposed to pointers, references and perhaps even aliasing. There’s usually a discussion about mutability intertwined here. Gaining an intuition of data types that represent text benefits from understanding encodings, which benefit from understanding how CPUs operate.
> I’ve yet to find a way through this for complete beginners. Learners with that already know another systems programming language have a distinct advantage here.
This, IMO, is the key to understanding why Rust is hard to learn: it was written as a systems programming language, and we now expect it to be more than that. I nodded my head in agreement as I read the intro to Rust until I reached the explicit use of lifetimes. To me that was where the abstraction got leaky. If your core abstraction of borrowing needed to expose the fact that the compiler uses lifetimes and needs a hint from time to time, you're saying explicitly that your audience are system programmers and they get that no abstraction is clean.
Take that up a few levels of abstraction and application development with Rust is hard. Maybe the rust community should just say: "Yes, its hard in the beginning, but its worth it if you stick with it. Welcome"
PS: I personally found it hard to learn Rust when I was looking for a static single binary generating language for my side project, and went back to C (please don't judge, its just familiarity). But I see what Rust can do.
... and from the post that the article links to: > Understanding String vs &str implies an understanding of the ownership system, which implies an understanding of the lifetime system. That probably means that you’ve been exposed to pointers, references and perhaps even aliasing. There’s usually a discussion about mutability intertwined here. Gaining an intuition of data types that represent text benefits from understanding encodings, which benefit from understanding how CPUs operate.
> I’ve yet to find a way through this for complete beginners. Learners with that already know another systems programming language have a distinct advantage here.
This, IMO, is the key to understanding why Rust is hard to learn: it was written as a systems programming language, and we now expect it to be more than that. I nodded my head in agreement as I read the intro to Rust until I reached the explicit use of lifetimes. To me that was where the abstraction got leaky. If your core abstraction of borrowing needed to expose the fact that the compiler uses lifetimes and needs a hint from time to time, you're saying explicitly that your audience are system programmers and they get that no abstraction is clean.
Take that up a few levels of abstraction and application development with Rust is hard. Maybe the rust community should just say: "Yes, its hard in the beginning, but its worth it if you stick with it. Welcome"
PS: I personally found it hard to learn Rust when I was looking for a static single binary generating language for my side project, and went back to C (please don't judge, its just familiarity). But I see what Rust can do.