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Sure, despite my frustrations with it (and with the often frankly false claims about it tirelessly repeated by people who identify too strongly with it - it's a

Sure, despite my frustrations with it (and with the often frankly false claims about it tirelessly repeated by people who identify too strongly with it - it's a programming language, not a signed-in-blood manifesto for world peace and ubiquitous sex), I'm actually still quite engaged in using and learning Rust. It's even my main language for my own projects right now (I no longer work in tech/dev). Some of that is just stubbornness (because I find it hard), but some practical (performance, WASMability etc). I do like the way the type system makes it seem like things snick precisely into place when you get things right. My beef (such as it is) is that I doubt I will ever get to the level of fluency where I 'just code' with it, rather than intermittent stripes of coding & fuming. It takes me probably 4x as long to do anything compared to any other language I've used (and although I'm not a talented programmer, I am a polyglot). Oddly on the cli parsing thing, I did end up finding a library I like - bpaf. It's kind of abstract but seems more conceptually principled than the near-universal clap. The kind of abstraction where once you have grasped a small set of orthogonal concepts, you can just combine them at will, seems OK to me. As contrasted with the type which has dozens of small rules, and special cases that rely heavily on (human) memory and/or constant doc lookups.

alpaca128 3y ago
> I doubt I will ever get to the level of fluency where I 'just code' with it, rather than intermittent stripes of coding & fuming. I know what you mean. I feel much more productive with it nowadays and many things just make sense now, but it took me a long, long time to get to that point. Rust is very much not beginner-friendly, and while I think it was worth it this is why it will never replace certain other languages. I don't mind the compilation speed as much as some people seem to do, but the learning curve definitely is a problem.
- pkolaczk 3y ago
  Prior experience and preferred style of programming can affect severely the difficulty of learning Rust. For me it was mostly 1 week of struggling a bit with the borrow-checker and even that only in places where I really wanted to avoid copies / allocations at all cost - achieving something I wouldn't be able to do at all in other languages. Later I realized that if you are ok with an occasional clone here and there, the borrow checker almost never stands in the way. And realizing I can move owned stuff around cheaply instead of copying/referencing was also another huge enabler. However I can imagine when Rust borrowing rules can be a huge pain. This happens when you expect to continue using the same style of programming that relies on big piles of (often cyclic) object graphs built with references/pointers, shared mutability, heavy (runtime) indirection and inheritance. A style that is so prevalent in OOP projects written in Java, JS, Python. I don't like this style at all, and always tried to avoid it even when coding in those languages, because I believe it causes more harm than good. Rust will simply force you to unlearn it. And some people won't need to unlearn much, and some will have to unlearn a lot. Changing habits is always pain. I think it should be simply considered a different paradigm.
  - crispinb 3y ago
    > I think it should be simply considered a different paradigm. I addressed this above and believe it to be an unconvincing explanation of Rust's difficulty. Many polyglot programmers comfortable with, and experienced in, switching (and learning new) paradigms, still find Rust more difficult than other languages they have learned. In my experience most just give up. I haven't, but neither have I become remotely productive in the language. Of course my experience is just one person's sample. There isn't much else to go one. But the Rust Foundation clearly agrees with me, given its 2024 roadmap. In our view, Rust is hard to learn and use, more than most languages, and problematically so for many.
    - pkolaczk 3y ago
      How come Rust appears at the top of most loved languages in the SO survey so many years in a row? And doesn't even make into the "most dreaded" list at all (when many simpler languages do make into that list)? Also, there aren't any other mainstream languages with borrow checker at the moment. The problem with Rust is that it introduces many novel ideas, not just some old ideas wrapped in a different syntax (e.g. like Kotlin or Swift). They need time to get into developers heads. Similarly it took many years to accept some ideas from FP into mainstream languages, and people were even debating if Java needed lambdas. And BTW: I didn't find Rust harder to learn than, e.g. Python or Scala... Scala was kinda fun, but FP required similar amount of mind-bending as lifetimes in Rust, and Python was just purely frustrating.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        > How come Rust appears at the top of most loved languages in the SO survey so many years in a row? And doesn't even make into the "most dreaded" list at all Because these two lists are mutually exclusive. On the survey they ask: * Do you use X today? * Do you want to continue to use X in the future? "Most loved" means "the ratio of yes/yes answers is high", and "most dreaded" means "the ratio of yes/no answers is high." Rust wins "most loved" because many users say yes/yes, and few say yes/no.

alpaca128 3y ago

> I doubt I will ever get to the level of fluency where I 'just code' with it, rather than intermittent stripes of coding & fuming. I know what you mean. I feel much more productive with it nowadays and many things just make sense now, but it took me a long, long time to get to that point. Rust is very much not beginner-friendly, and while I think it was worth it this is why it will never replace certain other languages. I don't mind the compilation speed as much as some people seem to do, but the learning curve definitely is a problem.

pkolaczk 3y ago
Prior experience and preferred style of programming can affect severely the difficulty of learning Rust. For me it was mostly 1 week of struggling a bit with the borrow-checker and even that only in places where I really wanted to avoid copies / allocations at all cost - achieving something I wouldn't be able to do at all in other languages. Later I realized that if you are ok with an occasional clone here and there, the borrow checker almost never stands in the way. And realizing I can move owned stuff around cheaply instead of copying/referencing was also another huge enabler. However I can imagine when Rust borrowing rules can be a huge pain. This happens when you expect to continue using the same style of programming that relies on big piles of (often cyclic) object graphs built with references/pointers, shared mutability, heavy (runtime) indirection and inheritance. A style that is so prevalent in OOP projects written in Java, JS, Python. I don't like this style at all, and always tried to avoid it even when coding in those languages, because I believe it causes more harm than good. Rust will simply force you to unlearn it. And some people won't need to unlearn much, and some will have to unlearn a lot. Changing habits is always pain. I think it should be simply considered a different paradigm.
- crispinb 3y ago
  > I think it should be simply considered a different paradigm. I addressed this above and believe it to be an unconvincing explanation of Rust's difficulty. Many polyglot programmers comfortable with, and experienced in, switching (and learning new) paradigms, still find Rust more difficult than other languages they have learned. In my experience most just give up. I haven't, but neither have I become remotely productive in the language. Of course my experience is just one person's sample. There isn't much else to go one. But the Rust Foundation clearly agrees with me, given its 2024 roadmap. In our view, Rust is hard to learn and use, more than most languages, and problematically so for many.
  - pkolaczk 3y ago
    How come Rust appears at the top of most loved languages in the SO survey so many years in a row? And doesn't even make into the "most dreaded" list at all (when many simpler languages do make into that list)? Also, there aren't any other mainstream languages with borrow checker at the moment. The problem with Rust is that it introduces many novel ideas, not just some old ideas wrapped in a different syntax (e.g. like Kotlin or Swift). They need time to get into developers heads. Similarly it took many years to accept some ideas from FP into mainstream languages, and people were even debating if Java needed lambdas. And BTW: I didn't find Rust harder to learn than, e.g. Python or Scala... Scala was kinda fun, but FP required similar amount of mind-bending as lifetimes in Rust, and Python was just purely frustrating.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      > How come Rust appears at the top of most loved languages in the SO survey so many years in a row? And doesn't even make into the "most dreaded" list at all Because these two lists are mutually exclusive. On the survey they ask: * Do you use X today? * Do you want to continue to use X in the future? "Most loved" means "the ratio of yes/yes answers is high", and "most dreaded" means "the ratio of yes/no answers is high." Rust wins "most loved" because many users say yes/yes, and few say yes/no.