[yawn]

It's not about refactoring for me. It's about trying to grok what the heck some library author or coworker was thinking when they went all Architecture Astronaut with the type system and traits. It reminds me of how people go crazy with OO and end up with delegation spread across several files. I already have to hold the problem in my head. I find that Go takes such a mental load off my shoulders that I find it the easiest to grok other's intentions (including my own several months/years later) in.

[kaba0]

It may depend on the problem at hand as well. I never really bought this “each line is easier to comprehend” reasoning, because then ad absurdum we would all be writing assembly.

But sure, one is a low level language which can and thus must care about every little detail, while the other is a managed language. (And honestly, mixing the two as if they share the same niche is very off putting)

[steveklabnik]

That's fair. In my mind, they're at least related: if I'm trying to learn about some code, I change stuff and see what breaks.

[scoutt]

Just as parent, my greatest struggle with learning Rust is to open someone else's code and trying to understand what is going on. With C that's a lot easier.

I you were to learn Rust from scratch, what project would you recommend for the "changing and breaking" approach?

[steveklabnik]

I don't know if I use that to learn the language itself, but also, different people have different learning styles. What I personally do to learn new languages is write some sort of program that I know well. So for me, that's text adventure games. When I'm trying to learn a new language, I go and make a very simple one. This helps because you're not learning a new domain and a new language at the same time.

But along the whole "break it" idea... I don't know if you're an IDE person or a text editor die-hard, but I've found that rust-analyzer helps a ton. I'm historically a "vim with no plugins" kind of guy, but I'm using VS: Code with the vim keybindings now, and even if I'm not changing some code and getting feedback from the compiler itself, using rust-analyzer to go "hey what's this type here? Where's it defined, let's go take a look" has helped a ton.

That said, types help and poking around helps, but it's not always a panacea. Today I'm working on fixing something that doesn't quite work, even though yesterday I figured out how to assemble everything I'm supposed to need from this library I'm using. "It compiles it works" is a thing people say, and while I feel that way often, it's not true all of the time, of course.