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Flattening Rust’s learning curve

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Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#131

Post by psychoslave »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #90
worik wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a trade off. Rust gave us fast, and safe. It did not give us "easy to learn". I think it is a very good example of why "design by committee" is good. The "Rust Committee" has done a fantastic job Thank you They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_camel_is_a_horse_designed_b... ) Yes: * Goes twice as far as a horse * On half the food and a quarter the water of a h…

It's just a programming language, not a religion.

Well, it does look like there is a will to mimic religious social structure in the community, be it as a satiric form of it. I mean, I guess they purposefully named their pancakes cargo, as in "cargo cult", didn't they? Rustacean, rustomicon, and the other few words I saw leak out of the community all seem to go in the same spirit. I'm almost surprised they didn't went with more fancy terms for these core concepts of ownership and borrowing. Perl was also full of religious stuff like blessing your object, though Larry was actually more in the "true devot" side of the line.

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#132

Post by etbebl »

remram wrote: post #93
mdwhatcott wrote: post #42

[flagged]

I don't know how to read your comment other than "nothing hard is worth doing". Some things have benefits and drawbacks, is the existence of drawbacks always a non-starter for you? I'm trying to phrase this as delicately as I can but I am really puzzled. If someone wrote an article about how playing the harp is difficult, just stick with it... would you also say that playing the harp is a terrible hobby?

Maybe people need persuading to learn Rust not just because they think it's hard, but also because they think it's bad? Not everything hard is worth doing. Difficulty is just one of the factors to consider.

I started to learn Rust, but I was put off by the heavy restrictions the language imposes and the attitude that this is the only safe way. There's a lack of acknowledgement, at least in beginner materials, that by choosing to write safe Rust you're sacrificing many perfectly good patterns that the compiler can't understand in exchange for safety. Eventually I decided to stop because I didn't like that tradeoff (and I didn't need it for my job or anything)

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#133

Post by psychoslave »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #36
alpinisme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be able to draw one that way but it completely neglects the way people use the term ordinarily “a steep learning curve” is not an easy to learn thing. In point of fact, I think the intended chart of the idiom is effort (y axis) to reach a given degree of mastery (x axis)

I don't think the idiom has in mind any particular curve. I think it's just another case of a misuse becoming idiomatic without any meaning beyond the phrase taken as a unit. E.g. - another think coming -> another thing coming - couldn't care less -> could care less - the proof of the pudding is in the eating -> the proof is in the pudding It's usually not useful to try to determine the meaning of the phrases on the…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#134

Post by SkiFire13 »

baalimago wrote: post #120

>For instance, why do you have to call to_string() on a thing that’s already a string? It's so hard for me to take Rust seriously when I have to find out answers to unintuitive question like this

Just because a language is not high level enough to have a unique concept of "string" type doesn't mean you shouldn't take it seriously.

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#136

Post by NitpickLawyer »

namuol wrote: post #96
rvz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Rust is so complex, it is even more complex for an LLM to generate correct code (one-shot) without hallucinating non-existent functions. Would rather have that than all the issues that JavaScript or any other weakly typed and dynamically typed language.

There _are_ more than two programming languages, though. I feel like most of the debates about Rust devolve into the same false choice between safety and ease. Before Rust I was hearing the same argument from Haskell or Scala developers trying to justify their language of choice. I know Rust is here to stay, but I think it’s mostly because it has a viable ecosystem and quality developer tools. Its popularity is _in s…

> features that trade that extra 1% of safety for 90% extra learning curve.

I remember both MS and goog having talks about real-world safety issues in the range of 50% of cases were caused by things that safe rust doesn't allow (use after free, dangling pointers, double free, etc). The fact that even goog uses it, while also developing go (another great language with great practical applications) is telling imo.

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#137

Post by estebank »

namuol wrote: post #101
yodsanklai wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a very complex I find it relatively simple. Much simpler than C++ (obviously). For someone who can write C++ and has some experience wth OCaml/Haskell/F#, it's not a hard language.

Sure, C++ has a more complex spec, nobody can argue against that. Complex is the wrong word. Baffling is a better word. Or counterintuitive, or cumbersome. If “easy enough for someone with experience in C++, OCaml, Haskell, and F#” were the same thing as “not hard” then I don’t think this debate would come up so frequently.

What you call "baffling", I call "different". Being different doesn't mean it's "complex" or even "hard" (in isolation), but it can be baffling, in the same way that driving on the other side of the road for the first time can feel baffling (but doesn't mean it's "wrong").

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#138

Post by codeflo »

Animats wrote: post #18

It's like reading "A Discipline of Programming", by Dijkstra. That morality play approach was needed back then, because nobody knew how to think about this stuff. Most explanations of ownership in Rust are far too wordy. See [1]. The core concepts are mostly there, but hidden under all the examples. - Each data object in Rust has exactly one owner. - Ownership can be transferred in ways that preserve the one-owner ru…

That's not explaining ownership, that motivating it. Which is fine. The thing that's hard to explain and learn is how to read function signatures involving (...) -> &'a [&'b str] or whatever. And how to understand and fix the compiler errors in code calling such a function.

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#139

Post by joatmon-snoo »

baalimago wrote: post #120

>For instance, why do you have to call to_string() on a thing that’s already a string? It's so hard for me to take Rust seriously when I have to find out answers to unintuitive question like this

Strings are like time objects: most people and languages only ever deal with simplified versions of them that skip a lot of edge cases around how they work.

Unfortunately going from most languages to Rust forces you to speedrun this transition.

Re: Flattening Rust’s learning curve

#140

Post by jillesvangurp »

Rust has a few big hurdles for new users:

- it's very different from other languages. That's intentional but also an obstacle.

- it's a very complex language with a very terse syntax that looks like people are typing with their elbows and are hitting random keys. A single character can completely change the meaning of a thing. And it doesn't help that a lot of this syntax deeply nested.

- a lot of its features are hard to understand without deeper understanding of the theory behind them. This adds to the complexity. The type system and the borrowing mechanism are good examples. Unless you are a type system nerd a lot of that is just gobblygook to the average Python or Javascript user. This also makes it a very inappropriate language for people that don't have a master degree in computer science. Which these days is most programmers.

- it has widely used macros that obfuscate a lot of things that further adds to the complexity. If you don't know the macro definitions, it just becomes harder to understand what is going on. All languages with macros suffer from this to some degree.

I think LLMs can help a lot here these days. When I last tried to wrap my head around Rust that wasn't an option yet. I might have another go at it at some time. But it's not a priority for me currently. But llms have definitely lowered the barrier for me to try new stuff. I definitely see the value of a language like users. But it doesn't really solve a problem I have with the languages I do use (kotlin, python, typescript, etc.). I've used most popular languages at some point in my life. Rust is unique in how difficult it is to learn.

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