They changed most loved to most admired, but it used essentially the same question.
At this point I lost count how many years this has been going on.
I know some python, a bit of Julia and matlab and remember parts of C, as the first language I picked up.
I was really excited about Rust after reading about it but when I tried to dip my toes in by looking at The Rust Book, I was lost by how complicated it was.
I don’t think I’m a coding whiz or extraordinarily smart. Given that do you rustaceans(?) think I could pick it up in a gentle way? Is it worth the time investment given how most of my actual work is basically simulating random processes or dynamic systems?
I think the biggest thing for me was a quote by No Boilerplate that said “Rust is not hard, it’s unfamiliar”. Most of ths confusing parts of Rust aren’t actually super complicated ideas, they are just presented in ways that are unfamiliar. Once you can push through that a lot of the language clicks abd starts to make sense.
Personally, what I did to learn rust was work on small simple projects that didn’t really need to worry about the borrow checker. Specifically, doing the advent of code puzzles.
That’s what got me started with rust in 2019 and now I’m a fulltime professional rust programmer. I’m definitely not a genius though.
Yeah, I mostly use AOC every year to try out a new language or learn new things in a known one. Even though I didn’t finish all the puzzles in the end, they were still great to keep the first few steps interesting. Highly recommended for rust beginner.
I think I struggled at least a couple months before I even got the hang of Rust. Read “the book” several times, didn’t help. Watched several videos, didn’t help. What eventually clicked for me personally was learn rust with entirely too many linked lists, I think I have read that 20+ times (still visit it sometimes).
6 months into it, I started getting better at organizing code and thinking more in terms of a data-driven approach (structs and impls) vs abstraction based (class and methods).
Bottom line is, everyone has a different approach to learning with wildly different times it takes to absorb knowledge. As for whether it’s worth, well, it’s still a relatively young language (compared to C, python, erlang, java) so you’re already early. Another decade and perhaps Rust becomes as universal as C is.
Yeah 100%
Learn about one concept at a time and take it slow. Look at something like options and understand how they work, then results, then the borrow checker etc and just take it slow. There are a lot of new concepts that are used all the time in rust but not in python, you just need time to learn em
Two hobbies I picked up in the last year was Rust programming and swimming.
I always find it most enjoyable when I go at a pace I’m comfortable with. The point is to stay motivated and if you are, your growth will be automatically guaranteed. You don’t need to be a natural or a genius, you just need to enjoy.
Besides, I’m sure the Rust community is always happy to welcome and support anyone that is curious, I know I am!
I hope that helps, good luck!
Rustlings is genuinely god-tier for learning Rust.
I’ll second Rustlings as a great learning experience. I haven’t had a chance to try it out, but The Book now has a link to a more interactive version that looks great.
