[klibertp]

> As a little experiment, I've deliberately avoided learning Rust to see if I can understand its idioms without reading any docs.

A result of applying this approach to languages in general would be only knowing a couple of fairly similar languages. Which is bad. Really, really bad. Language influences our way of thinking in a non-trivial way, knowing only one kind of language is limiting.

Even worse, you're going to forever stay constrained to one family of languages that you didn't (probably) even chose yourself. In a current world it's ok if you were introduced to a C-like language as your first, but what if it was Pascal or Scheme?

In short: DON'T DO THIS. Learn more languages, the more FOREIGN (ie. you can't understand anything without docs) the BETTER. The 'intuitive' languages only let you express the same solution again and again, while breaking AWAY from your intuitions and learning 'non-intuitive' languages let's you see and implement DIFFERENT solutions.