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Comment by rafterydj | Hacker News Reader

This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your business goals. Asking what that number is completely misses the point.

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Actually I found that if you have a pretty good understanding of the core parts of the C standard (e.g. the idea of the abstract machine, storage durations, unspecified vs undefined behavior, etc.) and working experience with the language, Rust is then quite natural. To first approximation, Rust basically makes lifetime management/ownership semantics that would be "good practice" in C into mandatory parts of the type system.

I agree - I was mostly trying to think of an example against OP's rather facetious attitude towards the time and effort required to maintain engineering performance.

In my experience, a lot of the Rust fighting with the borrow checker is really just enforcing better quality code I should've been writing anyway.

If all you got out of a Computer Science undergrad program was "learning C" you were severely shortchanged. An 8-week bootcamp could have done that.

Point still stands. You're going to take up the mantle for suggesting a computer science degree from 2000 completely qualifies someone for work in 2026? No further education needed?

If you've been working all that time, probably not, at least not any more than you had to learn any other language your employer was using.

The core concepts covered by a good CS curriculum haven't really changed. Specific languages were never the focus.

I don't disagree about the core CS fundamentals - 100% the same page. I suppose this really boils down to a difference in what constitutes "training/education".

Any $PROGRAMMER_TITLE worth their salary can learn a new stack for a project, because they know the fundamentals. BUT there's still a lead time on being comfortable with new languages, frameworks, problem domains, etc. It's this kind of time and effort that I am trying to get at when discussing companies paying for training/education. It can be worth investing in your people if your goals are longer horizon.

I don't think it makes sense for companies to pay for their employees to learn basic data structures or other "prerequisite" fundamentals, though. That would be a large investment!

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