Why am I having such a hard time learning Rust?

[tronderen]

I guess I learned most of the off-mainstream languages - such as APL, Snobol, Prolog - as a student; I didn't have to worry about professional use. Actually, I never used any of those three professionally, ever. None of the languages I have been required to learn as a professional has been anywhere close to 'exciting', considered as language designs. 'As a student' does not necessarily mean 'taking a course at the University'. Snobol I picked up for one single reason: On the network (before Internet - a network named MECC) we had access to at high school, I accidentally bumped into a version of Eliza (the therapist) - a rather primitive variant, but it was written in just 200 lines of Snobol source code. I was so impressed that I had to get to know that language! APL I learned in high school, too: I made friends with a guy whose father worked at IBM, having been on the 5100 design team (Wikipedia: IBM 5100[^]). He was so proud of his father's work that he insisted I learned to program that machine! I did, and was fascinated by APL. Prolog was a balloon ready to burst in my study days. It did, but not until I had completed a Prolog course. Nothing ever became of Prolog or the entire 5th generation project. I never programmed in Occam at all, but we studied it in one course at the university. I guess students of today also dive into a lot of stuff that they will never be using professionally. Maybe today they study all sorts of AI methods? I don't know. But I enjoyed being a student in the years when language design was hot and exciting.

[BryanFazekas]

trønderen wrote:

I guess I learned most of the off-mainstream languages - such as APL, Snobol, Prolog - as a student

Same here. I learned 6 or 7 languages during my studies, ones never looked at again. Personally, I believe CS students should be taught a range of languages they might never touch again, as it provides a breadth of understand that makes future learning easier.

[Joss451]

I'm 69.5 and I took on Rust this year. I approached it as a 30+ year C/C++/C# programmer. It does have quite the learning curve. Repetition was vital for me in my journey. I watched endless YouTube videos by different creators on a single aspect of Rust, say "borrowing," to understand it. I also used Manning courses for some. Some creators are better than others, of course. "Let's Get Rusty" on YouTube was my go-to for learning the rust-lang book in a structured fashion. Slowly, it jelled. Five months in, I can use the language, but I'm nowhere near an expert. The r/rust community on Reddit has also been great for helping me get unstuck from some of the idioms of the language. It was a lot of hours, but thinking back, learning C was as difficult. I'm glad I invested the time and suffered through the difficulties. It's a splendid language.

[dwight10000]

Sounds like me. Retired C++ developer, but I like to keep fiddling with code. Gave up on Rust (too hard) and have focused on Go for (windows) stuff and PHP for web stuff. I like Go because of the nice ecosystem, c-style syntax, and cool concurrency.

[Dweeberly]

Rust 'be hard'. Most of the syntax is similar to other languages like c, c++, c#, java, etc... However, most modern languages have been built around hiding and managing memory for you (ex: c#). The thinking is if you don't have to worry about memory management then you can spend more time on the logic. This generally works pretty well. However, Rust was designed to be a "System's language" (i.e. something you could write an OS, or driver or other system component in ... or a web browser, which is basically a self-contained OS these days). While having a familiar syntax, Rust thwacks you in the head and sometimes kicks you in the ...um... "lower mid-section" when it comes to memory management. For years we've been training ourselves to ignore memory management, but Rust put's it front and center in an almost assembly level way. The paradigm is flipped. Get the memory management right and the logic will follow. It's less that you are getting old and more that you've been indoctrinated into ignoring memory management. It's like changing a door that has been 'push' for 20 years to a 'pull' door. Consider your 'container system strangeness'. What are you 'containing'? In Rust you really only have references to memory, and you have to be perpetually aware of the ownership of those references. In C# I can conceptually 'add an object to a List'. I can't really do that in Rust. First no objects, second I can only really transfer ownership or copy memory, sure there's syntax to make it look otherwise, but that veneer of syntax is very thin. ... at least that's been my experience

[honey the codewitch]

I primarily code embedded with C++.

To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.

[Bertrand Mouton]

I do believe it is a function of age, but not in the sense that your brain atrophies, but more in a sense that the older you get the more you realize the relative value of things. I recall when I was much younger, I would do stuff simply because I though it fun or interesting. As I get older I understand that there are tradeoffs. Do I enjoy a You will learn Rust when you have a need to do so. Casually picking up a new language serves no purpose, and interest alone cannot carry the day. There has to be a purpose and intent, then you will learn it, otherwise you will not. I bet that if there was a wicked problem that captures your imagination, and you had to use Rust, you would learn it, and most probably enjoy learning it.

[Tim Yen]

I have read that it can be a real pain (not that I have coded in Rust) to manage memory because it has memory ownership. That's purely anecdotal by the by.

[Stuart Dootson]

Rust does have a number of facets that aren't like the C++ equivalents. I did last year's advent of code in Rust and the main thing I struggled with was how iterators were used - unlike C++, where (before C++20) you use STL algorithms, you chain method invocations, layering iterator transforms. The other things that are unfamiliar are traits (a bit like interfaces), which I knew from Haskell, where they're called type classes, and Rust enums, which are just ['sum types'](https://chadaustin.me/2015/07/sum-types/). Also, everything in Rust is an expression - no statements. Seems weird, but can be very handy (e.g. returning values from `if` or `match` (think `switch`) expressions grows on you, an then you go back to C++ and wonder why you can't do it there...). The memory management (well, lifetime) thing can be a pain, especially if you've got references flying round. But most of the time, you don't see it. I wrote [a little duplicate file finder in Rust](https://github.com/studoot/duplicate-finder), as something to give me experience with it. As for tooling - either [IntelliJ or CLion with Jetbrains Rust plugin](https://www.jetbrains.com/rust/) or VSCode with the [rust-analyzer extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rust-lang.rust-analyzer). I use the second one - it gives me pretty much as good a VSCode experience as I get with C++.

Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p

[honey the codewitch]

Stuart Dootson wrote:

Also, everything in Rust is an expression - no statements

Rust is a functional (vs imperative) language? Am I reading you right? Gosh I didn't even realize that.

To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.

[Stuart Dootson]

It has functional aspects, but it's still very much an imperative language. The way that it melds being an expression language with being an imperative one is that the semicolon separates and sequences expressions, much like the comma does in C. What can make it useful, though, is cases like those Rust making bindings immutable by default. For example, in C++, I might write ```C++ int x; switch(some_value) { case 0: x = 15; break; case 2: x = 29; break; default: x = some_function(some_value); break; } ``` I need to declare the variable separately from its initialisation, and then rely on it being mutable to do the initialisation (although I *could* do it all in one with an immediately invoked lambda expression...). In Rust, this becomes: ```Rust let x = match some_value { 0 => 15, 2 => 29, v => some_function(v), // Match any other integer value and bind v to it }; ``` Rust requires all bindings to be initialised, so for complex cases, getting a value out of something like a `match` can be very useful.

Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p

[Chad3F]

Rust might be best described as taking the traditional coding paradigm and turning it on its head. ... then chucking it into a blender and setting it on puree.