[tialaramex]

I learned C a very long time ago, but I'm not at all confident that it would be better, starting now, to learn C first before I learned Rust. I think Rust's design is a cleaner foundation.

Example: (Destructive) Move assignment is the correct thing, if you introduce that to begin with, showing Copy as an optimization, I think that makes more sense than the way it's often taught knowing people are familiar with languages that default to (or only have) copy assignment.

Another example: Rust doesn't have boolean coercion, the boolean coercion is so rife that you find it in otherwise seemingly principled languages, but the consequences are quite awful - in Rust you can cheerfully teach the entire language without this concern, because Rust doesn't have this coercion. "false" is neither true nor false, it's a string, 0 is neither false nor true, it's an integer. Many modern languages avoid C's extreme coercions - you can't write "Ten" + 5 or 'a' + 1 in such languages, (in a few of them it's a concatenate operation, which I don't love either, but at least it's not some weird coercion) - but they still insist "false" is true because it seemed easier and C did it. Rust does not.