My first programming language was Python. And now I write Python and Go frequently.

I'm trying to learn Rust, working through various programming exercises, but it looks and feels very foreign to me.

One example is the closure syntax. Compared to Go where closures look just like function definitions, closures in Rust look needlessly complex.

I also always find myself wanting to type mut &a instead of the correct &mut a. The former just seems more obvious to me, a reference to a is &a. Mutable a is mut a. So a mutable reference must be mut &a.

Then the lifetime syntax, I don't even know what to think of that, but that's probably more because I'm struggling asking myself "Should I use a lifetime here, or am I doing something else wrong that is preventing the compiler from figuring it out."

Maybe these things make more sense to people coming from C.