Rust's learning story has some interesting dichotomies in it. For sure, no one disputes that learning Rust is harder than say Python or Java. But how does it co

Rust's learning story has some interesting dichotomies in it. For sure, no one disputes that learning Rust is harder than say Python or Java. But how does it compare to C or C++? My take (which I have no proof for, to be clear) is that learning Rust is much easier than either of those if you're truly starting from zero. Some scattered thoughts about this: - Experienced C and C++ devs have to unlearn certain patterns when they start Rust. C++ experience can be a huge help, but if you insist on using the patterns you're used to in Rust, you often have a terrible time and feel like the compiler can't handle useful programs. - Particularly with C, what we usually mean when we say "learn" has gotten kind of out of date. If someone with a few years of programming experience says they "know" Python, we might assume they can make an HTTP request and parse some JSON with a couple minutes of googling the relevant API docs. But of course in C, those tasks are much more challenging, and we often allow that someone has "learned" C even if they can't do those things without great difficulty. Part of C's reputation for being (comparatively) easy to learn is that we don't expect programmers to be able to do the same variety of tasks with it. - A lot depends on what standard of correctness and security we want to apply. For example, writing multithreaded code in Rust has an extra steep learning curve, but the resulting code is data-race-free once it compiles. Writing big multithreaded programs without data races takes many years of experience in C and C++, and it might be genuinely impossible for sufficiently large projects. So depending on what we understand "learning to write multithreaded programs" to mean, we could say that Rust is much harder but also that Rust is much easier.