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I can't imagine how Rust may be the perfect low-level language for beginners given its unusual typesystem which comes with significant mental overhead. Really,

I can't imagine how Rust may be the perfect low-level language for beginners given its unusual typesystem which comes with significant mental overhead. Really, I have no idea how to explain 7 year old kids how to deal with Rust. It works perfectly with Pascal though.

zozbot234 4y ago
I don't think anyone has seriously tried to teach schoolkids to code in Rust just yet. But the way you'd do it would be to treat it as something close to a pure functional language. .clone() all the things and use Cell<> for the hopefully rare case where you really need shared mutability somewhere. (Even RefCell<> is arguably a step-up in complexity over Cell<>.)
- pshirshov 4y ago
  Essentially your proposal sounds like you would have to invent some kind of convention-defined language on top of Rust. The beauty of old Pascal was its compact feature set which is really easy to explain.
- mr_00ff00 4y ago
  I really think rust is great, but after learning what memory management is. Teaching rust first would just be a weird memorization of rules that you might not appreciate.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The borrow checking rules of Rust are anything but "weird". They boil down to not mixing up shared references and exclusive borrows; and, more subtly, preserving the distinction between temporary borrows and complete ownership. (I.e. only the owner can dispose an object; when borrowing, you can only give it back.) That's quite teachable, albeit using these rules in practice is not nearly as easy.
    - nequo 4y ago
      I agree, if C++ can be taught then so can Rust. But pedagogically, it is difficult to motivate why we can’t read a reference and mutate it in the same scope, since Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Lua, Lisp, Java, OCaml, C, etc. all allow it. It is much easier to accept this hurdle after having seen and debugged memory bugs and data races in, e.g., C.
      - mr_00ff00 4y ago
        I’m sure it could be, and maybe I am wrong but I know people say rust has a rough learning curve. I learned C and Typescript before ever touching rust, and I feel like I experienced no rough introduction. Maybe it’s anecdotal, but I always assumed I learned memory and semi-functional programming first, which made rust a breeze.
  - cxr 4y ago
    > Teaching rust first would just be a weird memorization of rules that you might not appreciate. That's pretty much exactly the situation with first-time programmers who are taught Java—none of the background to know why it makes the decisions it does.

zozbot234 4y ago

I don't think anyone has seriously tried to teach schoolkids to code in Rust just yet. But the way you'd do it would be to treat it as something close to a pure functional language. .clone() all the things and use Cell<> for the hopefully rare case where you really need shared mutability somewhere. (Even RefCell<> is arguably a step-up in complexity over Cell<>.)

pshirshov 4y ago
Essentially your proposal sounds like you would have to invent some kind of convention-defined language on top of Rust. The beauty of old Pascal was its compact feature set which is really easy to explain.
mr_00ff00 4y ago
I really think rust is great, but after learning what memory management is. Teaching rust first would just be a weird memorization of rules that you might not appreciate.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The borrow checking rules of Rust are anything but "weird". They boil down to not mixing up shared references and exclusive borrows; and, more subtly, preserving the distinction between temporary borrows and complete ownership. (I.e. only the owner can dispose an object; when borrowing, you can only give it back.) That's quite teachable, albeit using these rules in practice is not nearly as easy.
  - nequo 4y ago
    I agree, if C++ can be taught then so can Rust. But pedagogically, it is difficult to motivate why we can’t read a reference and mutate it in the same scope, since Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Lua, Lisp, Java, OCaml, C, etc. all allow it. It is much easier to accept this hurdle after having seen and debugged memory bugs and data races in, e.g., C.
    - mr_00ff00 4y ago
      I’m sure it could be, and maybe I am wrong but I know people say rust has a rough learning curve. I learned C and Typescript before ever touching rust, and I feel like I experienced no rough introduction. Maybe it’s anecdotal, but I always assumed I learned memory and semi-functional programming first, which made rust a breeze.
- cxr 4y ago
  > Teaching rust first would just be a weird memorization of rules that you might not appreciate. That's pretty much exactly the situation with first-time programmers who are taught Java—none of the background to know why it makes the decisions it does.