[zozbot234]

> Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in.

It's not hard, you just add boilerplate. Cloning data, using interior mutability, or adding ref counting to deal with cases where multiple "owners" can keep an object around independently.

Then removing the boilerplate is how you do optimization, once you've gotten things to work. The opposite of other languages where low-level code is the most verbose and least intuitive.

[aussiesnack]

> It's not hard,

Yep, that's the standard Rust aficionado flat insistence: "You're finding it hard. You're just wrong". Yet with more learning time than I've put into any other language I've learned, I have been unable to use Rust for real (ie. beyond beginner toys). A quick count of langs I've used professionally comes to about 10; I've learned many more to play with, much more successfully than with Rust, in much less time than I've spent with Rust. This reflects the experience of everyone I know who's tried it out (I'm the last man standing, having another crack at it this year).

The cultural peculiarity of this is that, in a field that generally lauds effort and intelligence, Rust advocates uniquely consider 'hard' or 'difficult' to be negative criticism. I don't hear this from (say) Haskell or Scala programmers. I certainly don't consider difficulty a negative - it depends on whether the payoffs are commensurate, and for Rust I think they are (I'd just quit otherwise).

As I'm 100% satisfied (no matter how often I'm unconvincingly 'corrected') that Rust is indeed harder than most programming languages to learn, I can only categorise this peculiarity as denial. Denial usually has ideological origins. I'm not entirely sure what they are in this case, though I have some ideas. These do feed into a sense that although I like the language, I don't think I like the Rust community much. I get strong religious/culty vibes from it - similar to the worst of the Linux community (for the record I also am a f/t Linux user, and I think that community has moderated considerably over time).

[insanitybit]

Just to be clear, again, lots of people find rust difficult. I found it easy. Lots of people find it easy. That's interesting.

Saying "rust is difficult" is silly to me because... it wasn't for me. Saying "rust is easy" is less silly to me because for me it was, but obviously for you it will be more silly because it isn't easy for you.

You'll find that many in the rust community are in fact very very sympathetic to your view that it's too hard to learn.

[aussiesnack]

> You'll find that many in the rust community are in fact very very sympathetic to your view that it's too hard to learn.

I have not found that. The very comment I'm responding to above is a correction, telling me "it's not hard", not saying on the writer's part that they didn't find it hard, and least of all with any curiosity towards any dev claiming that they find Rust hard, because that view is considered in the Rust commmunity plainly incorrect. This is what I have found, consistently in 2022. I plan to continue with Rust in 2023, but I'll probably largely go it alone.

[insanitybit]

Well I've been around Rust since before 2015 and I'm telling you that tons of people feel the language is too difficult. Maybe you haven't seen that, but you've also seen a tiny fraction of the community relative to me.

Going it alone sounds like a recipe for it being very difficult. I'd recommend interacting with the community when you have questions, it'll be very helpful.

My only point this entire time is that saying "rust is difficult" is just as wrong as saying "rust is easy". Rust was easy for me, fact. Rust was hard for you, fact. Both things are true.