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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

Rust easier to learn than JS lol... In Rust you have issues that will or will not overcome easily, nothing like that happen in Go. And seriously getting starting in Go takes less than an hour:

- Install Go

- Install VSCode + Go plugin

- Start working

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I explicitly said above that Go is an easy language to learn. But, I found Rust easier.

And, yes, I'm finding Rust easier to learn than JavaScript. Without question. It is a much, much, smaller and more cohesive language. It has some new concepts (features or techniques that I have never used in any other language), but so does modern JavaScript, and with JavaScript there's usually five ways to do it, and half of them are really poorly thought out. I don't dislike JavaScript. I'm not saying one shouldn't learn some; one definitely should. But, it's definitely going to be "some", for most people, because there's just too much of it to learn it all, unless you can devote yourself full-time to being a JavaScript expert. I aint got time for that.

As I mentioned, I've built a (toy) project in Go. I've spent more time with it than Rust at this point. I know how it works, and what getting started looks like. And, though Go was pretty easy with few pain points, I've found Rust to be easier and to provide a more clear path for a beginner to follow, so far.

Everyone is different, and we're all coming from different places. No one has exactly the same set of starting conditions for learning a new language as I do. For some, Go may be easier than Rust (I expected it would be, which is why I started with Go and avoided Rust for so long). For me, I am finding Rust easier. I haven't done much with it, but I was surprisingly productive surprisingly fast.

I for one totally agree on rust being easier to learn than Javascript. I suspect it is because of the explicitness of rust vs the flexibility of javascript where you can do literally anything you wish without any sort of guard rails, then there's the ecosytem with like a gazillion tools in your build pipeline. I really admire front end devs because they do what I cannot, I guess i'm not as clever a programmer, I need the compiler to hold my hand , lead the way, and yell at me when I am going astray, rust does that for me , and when I'm done obiding by the rules, cargo is there to take over the rest of the process.

I don't really care about the guard rails. I grew up in Perl (pre-strictures and warnings), and BASIC was the first language I ever built something in, so I'm not too fussed about things always feeling a bit loose, and having to defend yourself with tests and imposing some rules on yourself by convention.

While I think it's likely that having a stricter language is more likely to produce better software, especially as complexity grows, I don't think it has a huge impact on whether the language is "easy to learn" for me. Python is very lax (contrary to popular belief, Perl with strict/warnings is stricter than Python, and protects you against a wide variety of scope-related bugs, in particular) but I consider it an easy language, too, because it is consistent and small(ish). There's some kind of balance to be struck between elegance and simplicity, and between explicitness and concision, and Rust feels very good, so far. I don't think that balance will be the same for everyone.

JavaScript, to me, is hard just because it's so damned big and incoherent. It's been pulled in twelve directions at once for its entire life, and it shows. JavaScript is like a buffet that has Chinese food, Indian food, pizza, sushi, and tacos. Most of the food isn't very good, but there's a lot to choose from. It doesn't help that learning JavaScript also entails trying to make sense of the maelstrom of tooling that's available. While Rust has one clear path for beginners, JavaScript has a haunted corn maze.

Coincidentally, here's Rust's getting started workflow:

- Install Rust

- Install VSCode + Rust plugin

- Start working

Coincidentally, here's JavaScript's getting started workflow:

- Command + Option + J (on Mac+Chrome)

- Start writing JavaScript

For an apples-to-apples comparison, you would have to compare this to https://play.rust-lang.org and https://play.golang.org

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