> Java is wildly easier to pick up than Rust, though. Hordes of productive enterprise java programmers are employed today who frankly don't even understand what

> Java is wildly easier to pick up than Rust, though. Hordes of productive enterprise java programmers are employed today who frankly don't even understand what memory safety even means, much less the tradeoffs their language runtime (or software) needs to make to ensure it. I think Java is a little easier to pick up than Rust, but not much. And this is especially true if one is not already familiar with Object Oriented programming. Classes are weird - conflating a number of concepts that really ought to be orthogonal to each other (and I remember thinking so as a beginner, although I couldn't articulate why then). IMO, structs, enums, and traits are much easier to explain to a beginner. Rust does have the overhead of needing to care about ownership and memory, but I don't think that's as significant as you might think (and Java also leaks some of these details in for example the difference between objects and primitive types), and it partially makes up for it in other areas.