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by aldanor 2518 days ago
I'm not so sure about the "steep learning curve of Rust" stereotype anymore. If you are comfortable with low-level programming languages in general, in a few days you can get yourself started fairly quickly with Rust to the point where you will still battle with compiler re: borrowing and related things, but will be able to write functional code. Coming from pure Python/JS will be tough, but it will be the same with any other low-level language.
1 comments
aczerepinski 2518 days ago
My work is a Ruby/JS shop, and we have some Go in production as well. We definitely need a little hand holding to ramp anybody new up on the Go codebases. In many cases our devs haven't used types, pointers or any equivalent of goroutines & channels. I've written just barely enough Rust to say there are even more concepts that would be new to my team.

Even with Go being comparitvely simpler, I could go either way on whether it was the right choice to add it to the stack.

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LandR 2518 days ago
> In many cases our devs haven't used types, pointers or any equivalent of goroutines & channels.

How do you manage to get a job as a developer without having ever learned this stuff?

Are these people that are just self taught straight to javascript / ruby?

I mean, are CS course nowadays so bad that students come out of them without understanding things like type-theory, pointers etc

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aczerepinski 2518 days ago
To be honest, this response feels a bit aggressive and dismissive to me.

Many of my coworkers (myself included) entered the profession through bootcamps. Others came up during the PHP/Wordpress to Ruby/Rails era of web development, and never had a reason to learn languages like C++ or Java. I don't think there's anything to make fun of, or apologize for in this scenario.

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chessturk 2517 days ago
The shop I'm part of is staffed by bootcampers or fully self-taught people. Not a degree in sight. They have to be passionate about code/computer/the web/technology/math/some associated subject to thrive, but when they are, it seems to work out. I'm lead to believe this is the relative norm for web development.

Bootcamps do not teach things like pointers, type-theory, or big-O notation. I'm not sure what they do teach, I'm self-taught and via MIT Open Courseware + other net resources, have learned a lot about those, but I have no idea how that compares to either bootcamps or modern CS courses. Not all of my colleagues know about pointers or type-theory, but the senior ones do.

I don't know if my experience is unusual though.

edit: nicer formatting.

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