this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
73 points (100.0% liked)
Rust Lang
709 readers
1 users here now
Rules [Developing]
Observe our code of conduct
- Strive to treat others with respect, patience, kindness, and empathy.
- We observe the Rust Project Code of Conduct.
- Submissions must be on-topic
- Posts must reference Rust or relate to things using Rust. For content that does not, use a text post to explain its relevance.
- Post titles should include useful context.
- For Rust questions, use the stickied Q&A thread. [TBD]
- Arts-and-crafts posts are permitted on weekends.
- No meta posts; message the mods instead.
Constructive criticism only
- Criticism is encouraged, though it must be constructive, useful and actionable.
- If criticizing a project on GitHub, you may not link directly to the project’s issue tracker. Please create a read-only mirror and link that instead.
- Keep things in perspective
- A programming language is rarely worth getting worked up over.
- No zealotry or fanaticism.
- Be charitable in intent. Err on the side of giving others the benefit of the doubt.
No endless relitigation
- Avoid re-treading topics that have been long-settled or utterly exhausted.
- Avoid bikeshedding.
- This is not an official Rust forum, and cannot fulfill feature requests. Use the official venues for that.
No low-effort content
- Showing off your new projects is fine
No memes or image macros
- Please find other communities to post memes
No NSFW Content
- There are many other NSFW communities, let’s keep this related to the language
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
Rustlings is genuinely god-tier for learning Rust.
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!
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.