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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Would professionals in any other industry complain about a tool that took only weeks to learn? If a particular language really does help us write better software, a few weeks is a tiny amount of time to spend learning it. I think we focus too much on the experience of the people who write programs and not enough on the experience of the people who use them.

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They would probably complain if there were 50 different tools (each of which taking only weeks to learn) all promising to solve the same problems in different ways, and each largely excluding the other 49.

> Would professionals in any other industry complain about a tool that took only weeks to learn?

I would guess the answer is yes. After all the new tool needs to be much better than existing tools to justify weeks of retraining.

In fact, I suspect programmers are willing to put up with a lot more compared to other professionals since we do a lot of our learning in our spare time.

I think the initial investment and the lifetime investment are quite different.

They are probably evaluating: 'So, what do I feel about learning Rust stuff for the next 10 years?'

Would professionals in any other industry complain about a tool that took only weeks to learn?

The tools used in most other industries change on a time scale of decades, not months. Some of them don't change for centuries.

Pencils, hammers, and frying pans don't become obsolete, while the language/framework/magic thingie of the day is almost guaranteed to do so.

Maybe Rust will take over the world and last as long as C, Lisp, or FORTRAN, but that's certainly not the way to bet.

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