[rkallos]

I had the opposite experience to you. I found Pony much easier to learn than Rust.

Reference types are probably the trickiest bit to learn, especially in how they relate to Pony's generics. Everyone is different, but I found learning the 6 reference capabilities to be a lot easier than trying to understand borrowing and lifetimes in Rust.

I readily accept other reasons not to pursue Pony; it's library ecosystem is budding, the runtime is still a bit unstable, and there is limited support for non-x86_64 architectures. However, I invite anyone reading this comment to form their own opinion of the language. I feel I've benefited greatly from learning it.

Also, Pony has a pretty active community on Zulip, where you will find people who will jump at the chance to help you get unstuck while you're writing Pony. https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/

[vanderZwan]

> I feel I've benefited greatly from learning it.

I have this feeling (or maybe I should say "hope") that once you learn Pony reasonably well, you kind of take that "reference type awareness" with you and it will make you a better programmer no matter what language you are programming in. It basically makes explicit what you should already be doing implicitly.

I really should put in the effort to learn it someday

[staticassertion]

That's really interesting. I was trying to learn pretty early on, so I could believe that was part of it. But I tried to play around with it in some off time only just a few months ago and I hit a wall on reference types yet again :\

Funny how that works.