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Comment by aussiesnack | Hacker News Reader

But it's so easy to get a handle on how the borrow checker works! Just check out this thread and all will become clear: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-is-a-good-mental-model-of...

Joke btw. That thread is a hilarious trainwreck - surely the final nail in the coffin for the Rust advocates who so often deny anything about Rust is difficult to learn.

I don't mean that as an anti-Rust jibe, in fact I'm planning to get back to it this year (having given up in despair last). I like much about it, and think it's tremendously practical for many purposes. But it just is a difficult language, no question.

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I mean, some question. I learned Rust with 0 professional experience in any language (I learned it after I dropped out of a CS program after 2.5 years) and I found it pretty damn easy. That was in 2015 when the language was wayyyy less approachable (worse borrow checker, everything used nightly, smaller community, no book).

Easy is relative. I suspect a major reason I found it easy was because I didn't try to solve lifetime problems, I just cloned things. I also had primarily been using C++ in school so I was pretty familiar with pointers and, to some extent, ownership. Plus my initial foray into CS was driven by a desire to do exploit development professionally, so lower level details weren't scary at all.

> Easy is relative

In the case of programming languages, yes, it's relative to the difficulty of other PLs. I've learned many over the years, and found Rust by far the hardest (it's the only one that defeated me). And it's not the most different from others I've learned - lisps are far further from the common languages than Rust is.

> I suspect a major reason I found it easy was because I didn't try to solve lifetime problems,

Well yes anything's easy if you skip the hard bits. Learn C without using pointers.

I personally didn't find ownership & borrows the hardest part - in my case it's the great complexity of many of the commonly used libraries. Rust's complexity bleeds out into the entire ecosystem (a cultural thing).

> In the case of programming languages, yes, it's relative to the difficulty of other PLs.

I've learned many many PLs at this point. Rust was one of the easiest for me.

> Well yes anything's easy if you skip the hard bits. Learn C without using pointers.

That's my entire point. Rust is not hard if you learn the easy parts first. Trying to learn everything at once is not easy, no matter the language. Once the problem becomes just learning the borrow checker it's not that big of a deal. The harder thing to do is learning the borrow checker and traits and closures and blah blah blah.

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