[virtualritz]

TLDR; learning Rust through canonical code in tutorials often requires the student to learn bits about the language that are more advanced than the actual problem the resp. tutorial tries to teach how to solve in Rust. ;)

I prefer the latter now that I understand how all the Result/Option transformations work. As a beginner this would be hard to read but the former looks clunky.

Clippy also got pretty good lately at suggesting such transformations instead of if... blocks. I.e. I guess that means they are considered canonical.

In general I find canonical Rust often more concise than what a beginner would come up with but it does require deeper understanding. I guess this is one of the reasons why Rust is considered 'hard to learn' by many people.

You could actually teach Rust using pretty verbose code that would work but it wouldn't be canonical (and often also not efficient, e.g. the classic for... loop that pushes onto a Vec vs something that uses collect()).

[mprovost]

This is very true - to fully explain a "hello world" program you'd have to dive into macro syntax... When writing my Rust book I often start by showing the naive solution, and then later move to more canonical code once I've introduced more syntax that enables something more elegant. But I'm aware that I'm showing something non-optimal to start. Maybe that loses some trust, like people think they're learning something only to be told later on that it's wrong? On the other hand if you start with the optimal solution you have to teach so much syntax that it's overwhelming. I expect that some folk want every example to be perfect, but I'm going with an approach where you iterate through each chapter and as you progress through the whole book the examples get better and more idiomatic.

[steveklabnik]

This is basically an eternal battle when teaching. Personally I prefer to try and stay to only idiomatic code if at all possible, but there's pros and cons to each approach.

(This is one reason why I'm glad other people are also writing books! Not everyone likes my style!)

[stouset]

Or when necessary, use the verbose approach to lead toward and explain the idiomatic approach!

[steveklabnik]

Even then: code examples get copied. People go "oh this works for me" and don't bother reading on to the better approach.

It's tough :)