[cmrdporcupine]

It's like skiing (or maybe riding a bike for the first time.) Steep learning curve then becomes somewhat instinctual and fairly routine and trivial and fun. Until you get into the tricky terrain, and then it will put up resistance. But usually for your own good.

[neoCrimeLabs]

Rolling with the analogy, I think learning rust a lot more like snowboarding, and C/C++ is more like learning to ski.

I fell a lot more learning on snowboard than on skis.

Skis had a much quicker early learning curve, and made me feel over-confident. Several times I found myself on trails too steep for my skills, and the skis made me have to work hard to recover. Most of the techniques I learned as a beginner didn't work beyond green trails, and blues, blacks all required new, harder, techniques.

With snowboarding, because I fell a lot more early, my confidence slowly grew. Meanwhile the techniques I was learning on the greens, and the tool in general, that were HARD to learn on the greens were actually EASIER on the blues, and continued to work on the black-diamonds. Granted I also had to learn new techniques on the harder trails, but the beginner techniques and the slower development made me MUCH more confortable across the whole mountain much faster than skis.

Double-blacks are more like unsafe rust. :-D

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah, fair, I often make the same point about snowboarding vs skiing. Skiing is "easy" to pick up but difficult to master. Most people on the hill are just backseating it down in bad form, like they learned in their first week. Getting good form is ... a lifelong effort.

Snowboarding is brutally hard to pick up at first, unless you hate your tailbone. I have never really tried, I'm too old for that kind of pain.

But I'm a telemark skier, so the worst of both worlds :-) Maybe telemark is like advanced C++. But probably more like Haskell.

[arethuza]

Isn't that the same for most languages once you move beyond vanilla Java/C#/Go etc.?

[cmrdporcupine]

Rust has "opposite" call semantics from what most people are used to, trained since they were new programmers. Sort of. It takes a while to think like the borrow checker and get used to the way arguments get passed around. It's like using C++ and doing std::move for every non-reference argument.

[alternatex]

Sounds like the transition from OOP to functional. It feels opposite before you become comfortable.