> For me, writing the data-structures is the canary in the mine. It's the next step from hello world when trying to pick up a new language. Most importantly, tr

> For me, writing the data-structures is the canary in the mine. It's the next step from hello world when trying to pick up a new language. Most importantly, trying to write a few simple data-structures hints at the difficulty that will be encountered writing a 'real' program. You're missing the point of the post here, and drawing the exact correlation that the post is warning against. Just because something is easy in C++ does not mean that it must be easy in other languages. In fact, writing good data structures in C++ is hard too (try writing an actually safe std::vector clone, it gets tricky), just that C++ will happily let you have an unsafe API; Rust will complain. This is the old "grade the intelligence of a fish by its ability to climb a tree" problem. There is no intrinsic reason why the difficulty of writing datastructures should correlate with the difficulty of writing actual code. It is an easy task in C/C++, and thus it is often an early part of the learning experience.