Flattening Rust’s learning curve

I see people make the same mistakes over and over again when learning Rust. Here are my thoughts (ordered by importance) on how you can ease the learning process. My goal is to help you save time and frustration. Stop resisting. That’s the most important lesson. Accept that learning Rust requires adopting a completely different mental model than what you’re used to. There are a ton of new concepts to learn like lifetimes, ownership, and the trait system. And depending on your background, you’ll need to add generics, pattern matching, or macros to the list. Your learning pace doesn’t have much to do with whether you’re smart or not or if you have a lot of programming experience. Instead, what matters more is your attitude toward the language. I have seen junior devs excel at Rust with no prior training and senior engineers struggle for weeks/months or even give up entirely. Leave your hubris at home. Treat the borrow checker as a co-author, not an adversary. This reframes the relat ... Read full article.