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Comment by BFLpL0QNek | Hacker News Reader

This argument gets posted for nearly every [insert language name] that isn’t JS/Java/Python.

It’s not to hard to learn. The Rust web stack is fairly simple and easy to get going with in a few days. Good developers use many languages and enjoy using many languages. If you drop the usual requires ten years experience you have just increased your hiring pool to a bunch of people who are excited to learn so will often put in the hard work to learn.

It’s a bit disrespectful to think a new grad can’t use a language other than JS/Python and they’ll be more productive in JS/Python. How little do you think of grads?

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I think highly of the new generation and would consider a good new grad about as good as me (a senior-level SWE age 26). My experience with fully learning and using Rust is that it's a constant burden for high-level work no matter how well you know it. Similarly with C++, except that is even worse.

Rust has its place for things that need to be especially optimized. It's far too pedantic for the kind of things you can do in NodeJS or Flask. New grad would be annoyed, and so would I.

I don't know a whole lot about Rust, but if the pedantism is related to syntax, wouldn't current AI-assisted programming tools be able to help with that?

I've had GPT-4 explain to me weird niches in Django that I don't understand, because I'm coming from a Javascript background. It'll pick up what I'm trying to do, give me the code I'm trying to write, and tell me where I went wrong.

In the process I learn a lot, and waste a lot less time trawling Stack Overflow and parsing other people's code and closed threads.

It's a lot like having a more experienced developer over my shoulder.

To answer your question, yes. This is also what I try to hint people at work who refuse to move past the "real programmer" languages, most of their talent is very soon replaceable by GPT.

Idk if you'd call it syntax or what, but what makes Rust pedantic is that you're always worrying about lifetimes, types, explicit errors (as opposed to exceptions), and other things you mostly don't think about in JS or Py. It's like C++ only nicer and safer. It's not that JS/Py is a lower skill, it's that devs don't want to waste time. Of course Rust or C++ makes plenty of sense for lower-level stuff or anything that needs to be especially optimized.

> It's like C++ only nicer and safer

Rust is enforcing safety while C++ does not. C++ can be safe if you need it to be. Just use safe constructs.

I'd argue that some people might not find Rust nicer.

C++ won't be as safe as Rust unless you use it like Java, copying everywhere or overusing shared_ptr so you don't worry about lifetimes, which nobody really does.

I would argue that learning the language is the easy part even though in my experience some languages are much more difficult in practice to become effective in than others. The hard part is acquiring the expertise related to the domains where particular languages are commonly used. Knowing a language does not convey competence in the domain where they are typically used or the idioms imprinted on the use of the language by those users.

Knowing the language is necessary but not sufficient. There is an enormous amount of practice around language that is not implied by the language itself that you need to learn if you want to be effective.

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