[dragonwriter]

> That said, I am curious why different people have these different feelings. One aspect is likely rooted in the fact all of our brains are different. But I also wonder if first impressions play a big role here.

Path dependency has big impact on what seems natural, intuitive, etc. Part of that is what you've done before, and part is first impressions, and part of it is your approach to learning (or the approach taking to teaching you) the subject at hand.

I’ve approached Rust via different books and tutorials before and come up with the “it’s awesome, but too hard” feeling and set it aside.

Recently I've been trying Hands-on Rust [0] and going off to the side from it and Rust is clicking pretty well. Not sure if the book is a better fit for me, if the past false starts have prepared the ground, or what specifically changed.

[0] https://pragprog.com/titles/hwrust/hands-on-rust/

[littlestymaar]

> Path dependency has big impact on what seems natural, intuitive, etc

So much this. One example I hit a lot is when people keep saying “async/await is too hard, green threads are much more intuitive”: coming from a JavaScript background I feel async/await and all the future combinators much more intuitive than dealing with threads and channels. Before async rust was stabilized I had to learn how to use threads and I was always frustrated how clunky it felt, and now that Rust has async/await I use it for everything IO related, because to me it's just much more familiar.

[eminence32]

I hadn't heard of the term "Path dependence" before, thanks for sharing that. I think your comment is a better articulation of what I was trying to say: it's not actually about your first impressions with rust, but really about all your past experiences with programming and learning programming languages (up to and including your first impressions with rust)