4 ms·

How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023?

arch-ninja 4y ago
6 months if you're a college-sophmore-level student doing it part-time (my own experience + numbers), I'd estimate 3-4 weeks if you were spending more than 3hrs/day on it and knew 2 other languages.
- oneplane 4y ago
  That would be my estimate as well. I've seem some porting between Go and Rust (both ways) where either way an experienced developer with some multi-language knowledge got up and running in a day, writing useful code in a week and being proficient enough to do normal sprint work in about another week. It mostly depends on what you have in you brain, what you see when you look at code, and if you understand why you do what you do rather than repeating a trick and hoping it works, and I suppose that is a combination of theory and experience.
steveklabnik 4y ago
> How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? I think it's exceedingly difficult to make such a broad generalization. There's a number of factors here at play, but for example, I think the struggles of a Rubyist learning Rust are very different than a C developer learning Rust, and are very different than someone who's proficient with both who is learning Rust. It's also hard because there's also just other random factors. There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. Sometimes it takes coming back two or three times. Do you count all of that dead time? Something in there helped, but it's unclear what, or why this affects some people. Another theme of stories I've heard is a sort of Golidlocks situation about how "right" you think the compiler is. Some folks have the attitude that the compiler is to be seen, not heard, and should stop nagging them about things. Those folks tend to really struggle with Rust, even if they have lots of relevant experience previously. Likewise, some folks trust the compiler so completely that they will lose a bunch of time when a compiler suggestion leads them down the wrong path. Luckily, that problem is easier to fix than the former one, and is rarer and rarer every day. But these sorts of attributes are completely separate than what we think of when we talk "competency" of devs. > In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023? This sounds tautological, but bear with me: it's whatever path gets you to learn Rust. That sounds trite but what I mean is that different people have different needs (see above) and so need different things. There is no one best way. For some people, the book works really, really well. For others, they either hate the writing style, or the pace, or just something ineffable. I wouldn't say that they're wrong for that, just that they'd be served by different strategies. What I will say is that "I know other languages, I can just kinda start coding and pick it up" tends to not work for almost anyone. You either need to be quick to ask questions from the community, or be willing to do some reading, or you may run into some struggles that will take you longer to overcome than if you were willing to get some help. Folks who take advantage of community resources, broadly speaking, tend to do better than folks that think they can write some code and learn solely through errors, as Rust's semantics are just unique enough that some background and explanation can be extremely helpful.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  > There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. This was my experience, I came back a year or two later, and both I and the language had improved. I'm not sure who improved more, but whatever happened I'm really enjoying the language now.
eYrKEC2 4y ago
My current employer has a web backend and CLI in Rust. I joined the company having only dabbled in Rust, but having a background in C++, python, javascript, and verilog. It took me a month to feel able to do things and 3 months to feel reasonably comfortable. Still haven't mastered it after 1.5 years. Certain pieces of the rust ecosystem have their own learning curve such as diesel orm.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  I was using Chat GPT to learn rust but most of the examples it generated were pretty old (mysql 4 vs now at 21).
  - joshka 4y ago
    As a fellow rust n00b, one of the big problems I'm seeing with using ChatGPT to generate rust is that it often doesn't have a good model of ownership semantics. This has caused me lots of burnt time working through plausible but not accurate solutions to problems.
    - andrewstuart 4y ago
      You’re saying AI has trouble learning Rust too?
      - joshka 4y ago
        Lol. Yup. Though it’s possible that it was overfitting its response to my noob questions. I’ve had better luck since.
joshka 4y ago
The tokio tutorial is (mostly) pretty well written and worth a read. There's a lot of good docs like rust-by-example and the rust book, but for my liking, those both seem to spend too much time on each topics rather than distilling the info into smaller denser topics. This is probably great for newer developers but more difficult for someone that wants to learn the 30 second version of something rather than the 5 minute version. It's possible that punching these books through a GPT prompt like "Extract the salient points from the following:" might help?

arch-ninja 4y ago

6 months if you're a college-sophmore-level student doing it part-time (my own experience + numbers), I'd estimate 3-4 weeks if you were spending more than 3hrs/day on it and knew 2 other languages.

oneplane 4y ago
That would be my estimate as well. I've seem some porting between Go and Rust (both ways) where either way an experienced developer with some multi-language knowledge got up and running in a day, writing useful code in a week and being proficient enough to do normal sprint work in about another week. It mostly depends on what you have in you brain, what you see when you look at code, and if you understand why you do what you do rather than repeating a trick and hoping it works, and I suppose that is a combination of theory and experience.

steveklabnik 4y ago

> How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? I think it's exceedingly difficult to make such a broad generalization. There's a number of factors here at play, but for example, I think the struggles of a Rubyist learning Rust are very different than a C developer learning Rust, and are very different than someone who's proficient with both who is learning Rust. It's also hard because there's also just other random factors. There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. Sometimes it takes coming back two or three times. Do you count all of that dead time? Something in there helped, but it's unclear what, or why this affects some people. Another theme of stories I've heard is a sort of Golidlocks situation about how "right" you think the compiler is. Some folks have the attitude that the compiler is to be seen, not heard, and should stop nagging them about things. Those folks tend to really struggle with Rust, even if they have lots of relevant experience previously. Likewise, some folks trust the compiler so completely that they will lose a bunch of time when a compiler suggestion leads them down the wrong path. Luckily, that problem is easier to fix than the former one, and is rarer and rarer every day. But these sorts of attributes are completely separate than what we think of when we talk "competency" of devs. > In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023? This sounds tautological, but bear with me: it's whatever path gets you to learn Rust. That sounds trite but what I mean is that different people have different needs (see above) and so need different things. There is no one best way. For some people, the book works really, really well. For others, they either hate the writing style, or the pace, or just something ineffable. I wouldn't say that they're wrong for that, just that they'd be served by different strategies. What I will say is that "I know other languages, I can just kinda start coding and pick it up" tends to not work for almost anyone. You either need to be quick to ask questions from the community, or be willing to do some reading, or you may run into some struggles that will take you longer to overcome than if you were willing to get some help. Folks who take advantage of community resources, broadly speaking, tend to do better than folks that think they can write some code and learn solely through errors, as Rust's semantics are just unique enough that some background and explanation can be extremely helpful.

DangitBobby 4y ago
> There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. This was my experience, I came back a year or two later, and both I and the language had improved. I'm not sure who improved more, but whatever happened I'm really enjoying the language now.

eYrKEC2 4y ago

My current employer has a web backend and CLI in Rust. I joined the company having only dabbled in Rust, but having a background in C++, python, javascript, and verilog. It took me a month to feel able to do things and 3 months to feel reasonably comfortable. Still haven't mastered it after 1.5 years. Certain pieces of the rust ecosystem have their own learning curve such as diesel orm.

DoesntMatter22 4y ago
I was using Chat GPT to learn rust but most of the examples it generated were pretty old (mysql 4 vs now at 21).
- joshka 4y ago
  As a fellow rust n00b, one of the big problems I'm seeing with using ChatGPT to generate rust is that it often doesn't have a good model of ownership semantics. This has caused me lots of burnt time working through plausible but not accurate solutions to problems.
  - andrewstuart 4y ago
    You’re saying AI has trouble learning Rust too?
    - joshka 4y ago
      Lol. Yup. Though it’s possible that it was overfitting its response to my noob questions. I’ve had better luck since.

joshka 4y ago

The tokio tutorial is (mostly) pretty well written and worth a read. There's a lot of good docs like rust-by-example and the rust book, but for my liking, those both seem to spend too much time on each topics rather than distilling the info into smaller denser topics. This is probably great for newer developers but more difficult for someone that wants to learn the 30 second version of something rather than the 5 minute version. It's possible that punching these books through a GPT prompt like "Extract the salient points from the following:" might help?