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When I started learning Rust after ~25 years of C++, I was quite productive after a couple of months. If C++ teaches you something, it's that you can be product

When I started learning Rust after ~25 years of C++, I was quite productive after a couple of months. If C++ teaches you something, it's that you can be productive with a language without being fully familiar with it. After all, 25 years doesn't seem to be enough for learning C++. The borrow checker is not such a big deal. You should have learned the basics in undergraduate CS in the context of concurrency and/or databases. If you have done shared data parallelism in modern C++ (let's say with OpenMP), you are probably used to similar reasoning. Borrow checking and lifetimes do make some design patterns difficult to use, which is a reason you should not use such patterns in Rust. But there are almost always ways of achieving the same goals with idiomatic Rust. It's a bit like having to unlearn gotos when transitioning from BASIC to more serious languages and their fancy "structured programming".

arinlen 5y ago
> When I started learning Rust after ~25 years of C++, I was quite productive after a couple of months. Stating that it takes 25 years of experience in order to become productive with Rust doesn't really sound like a positive note. Keep in mind that your typical user of high-level programming languages already has a very hard time grasping the basic mechanics of C++, and Rust's memory management paradigm alone is renowned for having quite a steep learning curve when compared to C++.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  FWIW I was productive in Rust after a couple of months with a background ~5-10 years of experience in primarily JavaScript and PHP (no prior low level experience). Rust does have a steep learning curve, but I'd argue that it's shallower than that of C++ (which puts shoots up in complexity as soon as you wish to include a dependency). This is especially true if you are actually intending to write production code. There's no way I'd have comfortable releasing my C++ code to production after only 2 months, but my Rust code was completely solid despite my lack of experience in the language.

arinlen 5y ago

> When I started learning Rust after ~25 years of C++, I was quite productive after a couple of months. Stating that it takes 25 years of experience in order to become productive with Rust doesn't really sound like a positive note. Keep in mind that your typical user of high-level programming languages already has a very hard time grasping the basic mechanics of C++, and Rust's memory management paradigm alone is renowned for having quite a steep learning curve when compared to C++.

nicoburns 5y ago
FWIW I was productive in Rust after a couple of months with a background ~5-10 years of experience in primarily JavaScript and PHP (no prior low level experience). Rust does have a steep learning curve, but I'd argue that it's shallower than that of C++ (which puts shoots up in complexity as soon as you wish to include a dependency). This is especially true if you are actually intending to write production code. There's no way I'd have comfortable releasing my C++ code to production after only 2 months, but my Rust code was completely solid despite my lack of experience in the language.