I think part of the problem might be that String and &str are not related in any intuitive way. My initial work in Rust was littered with what the heck is this,

I think part of the problem might be that String and &str are not related in any intuitive way. My initial work in Rust was littered with what the heck is this, what's a str that there's a reference to, etc. I understand now, but initially it made absolutely no sense that String is a heap-allocated owned string and &str is a reference to a chunk of string data of known length stored somewhere that I probably don't have to care about. It may be a teaching thing, but I do wonder if they could have been named better. I just don't really know what else you'd call them without them becoming overly verbose.