[vthriller]

> this language is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from anything else I know

Rust itself borrows a lot from functional programming while also topping the story with lesser-known things like lifetimes, so no wonder it feels alien to a lot of people. In fact, the following:

> I can imagine that in 20 years there might be a whole slew of languages that borrowed ideas from rust

is actually already happening, except it's FP that's inspiring contemporary language designers (including Rust team).

To me personally even limited familiarity with Haskell probably helped a lot back when I started tinkering with Rust, it all felt more familiar to me than to average C or Python dev.