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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

Rust is easy to learn and user friendly. But if you are stuck in your ways and insist on writing code exactly like you did in another language you will have a hard time. This is true for every language on earth. Rust will refuse to compile, whereas other languages give you much more freedom to not use them as they are meant to.

> If a C++ programmer (ideal Rust learner)

There is no ideal learner.

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> Rust is easy to learn and user friendly. But if you are stuck in your ways (...)

It's high time that people in the Rust community such as you just stop with this act.

The Rust community itself already answered that they find "Rust too difficult to learn or learning will take too much time" as a concern to not use Rust. The community also flagged Rust being too difficult as one of the main reasons they stopped using Rust.

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve...

Anyone who has managed to become proficient in C++ is smart enough to be proficient in Rust. The only too difficult part is adapting to the rust way of doing things and some refuse to.

> Anyone who has managed to become proficient in C++ is smart enough to be proficient in Rust.

I'm not sure you're paying attention. The people who are saying Rust is too hard are the Rust community itself. They said so in Rusty's annual survey. The ones who participate in it are Rust users who feel strongly about the topic to participate in their governance.

It's Rust users who say Rust is too hard. There is no way around this fact.

There is a saying among Haskellers that "Haskell has the steepest unlearning curve". Sounds like Rust is similar.

> Anyone who has managed to become proficient in C++ is smart enough to be proficient in Rust.

I agree completely. But I'd reword your statement slightly as "Anyone who has managed to become proficient in the language that is notorious for being one of the most complicated and convoluted languages in existence, with the most footguns per line of code and a CVE record that proves its difficulty, ..."

It changes the conclusion just a tad.

Everybody who has managed to become proficient building a school is smart enough to be proficient in building a library.

So building libraries must be easy, that's totally why you can become an architect over night ... What a stupid argument you delivered

You just seem to have missed the point the author was making. I will try to clarify it: when you find out that a decision you made early on didn't pan out and you're forced to change the lifetime of some data, this will incur major refactoring in Rust and that will cause you to lose a lot of time. It's nearly impossible to avoid mistakes like this, not because you don't know Rust enough, that's almost completely irrelevant... it's because you just can't predict the direction your design will go to after many iterations and changes in requirements, which are unavoidable in the real world.

Replying to that with "Rust is easy to learn" just makes it sound like you didn't even understand what you're trying to reply to.

Rust is not easy to learn. Stop saying that. It is hard. It is harder than C#, harder than Python, harder than Java, harder than PHP, harder than JS, Harder than TS.

Saying it is easy to learn is just delusional and does a disservice to the language. Rust has many advantages, but trying to get people learning the language by lying about why they should learn it is just dumb.

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