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Comment by mmstick | Hacker News Reader

It's not really hard. It's incredibly easy, from my perspective. It only took me about a week to get a hang of it -- about the same amount of time that it took me to get the hang of Go. Yet the difficulty curve progressively becomes easier and easier until it's much easier to write and maintain software in Rust than Go or even Python. Now I can regularly slap out solutions to challenging problems that would be much harder in 'easier' languages.

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Rust has benefits for writing and maintaining correct code, sure. But your claim here is absolutely absurd. Rust is quite difficult to learn- anecdotally, empirically, and by nature.

Being dishonest about Rust is not going to help anyone no matter how good it is.

Rust frontloads some required learning related to shared data because of the borrow checker and lifetimes (which is different example of the same kind of frontloaded learning that comes with static type checking.)

OTOH, I don't think this makes it harder to learn in net, because it saves down-the-road learning needed for high effectiveness of a likely greater magnitude than what is frontloaded. But it does raise the learning cost of getting to basic proficiency, in the same way as static typing (which, done well, has the same kind of down-the-road savings) does.

It's entirely dishonest and ignorant to simply discredit and dismiss someone's point of view because you have it set in your mind to not believe a point of view that isn't your own. My history with Rust is proof alone that there is more to the story than you claim. I'm not the only one that has no difficulty with Rust either.

It is all a matter of mindset, and so if you think it is hard, then it will be hard. However, you must remember that like many things in life, learning is like a Chinese finger trap. The more you struggle and resist, the harder it seems. Rust is a Chinese finger trap. Until you change your point of view and use a different, simpler approach, you will have hard time.

http://mmstick.tk/posts/id/292

Your posts in this thread are good examples of how the "Rust Evangelism Task Force" meme started: it's great that you're enthusiastic about Rust, but you're not tempering your enthusiasm with pragmatism nor with empathy for your audience, like, for instance, the core team does.

Pushing back on the Rust-is-hard "misconception" where it is wrong is good, but calling the language universally easy just because you happened to learn it quickly... is wild: it incorporates ideas from a lot of different languages, so many people will be encountering more than one completely new concept. It can often take a while to "click" onto a new concept, because one isn't used to framing problems in the way that makes the concept simple. For one, saying Rust is easy so stridently, without nuance, makes people who are struggling feel stupid and demeaned (yes, I'm sure you don't mean it that way, but that's how it comes across), and makes you personally sound rather arrogant (/r/iamverysmart material).

In any case, with such ardent advocacy and combativeness, your technical arguments need to be 100% perfect: people will remember reading wild assertions they know to be wrong ("some Rust guy was talking about how ..., it wasn't even close to correct") more than they remember normal discussion about Rust. And this applies to both the people directly commenting, and the orders of magnitude more who are just reading the threads.

It is all a matter of mindset, but you are blindly ignoring the fact that it takes effort to learn a new mindset. Maybe it went smoothly for you and that's fine (though I suspect you're just not remembering it, perhaps willfully). In fact it went relatively smoothly for me as well.

The point is claiming it's easy dismisses the very real obstacles that exist for others, and does worse than nothing at convincing people to try Rust. So I second dbaupp's sibling comment here- your comments embody the aspect of the Rust community that turns people away.

Please, just slow down in your advocacy. It's not helping.

I had zero issues learning and then creating software with Rust shortly thereafter. In fact, we even have recent threads in the Rust user's forum from people that have picked up Rust and already have some software solutions implemented it on day one. To claim otherwise is just denial.

Good thing nobody's claiming otherwise, then. Quit trolling (or, on the off chance you're sincere, learn some basic logic).

Seems you need to learn what trolling and logic are before using those terms.

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