[steveklabnik]

For whatever it's worth, I used to do a lot of teaching, and I have a similar hunch to

> I think it’s because I, and other early Rust learners I’ve talked to about this, had little preconceived notions of how a programming language should work. Thus the restrictions imposed by Rust were just as “arbitrary” as any other PL, and there was no perceived “better” way of accomplishing something.