---
title: "Comment by waterlubber on \"Learning Rust in 2023: A Call For Discussion\" | Hashnode"
description: "I started a couple of years ago and ran into the classic learning wall that others hit as well. I think a major issue, personally, was that I had very little CS"
url: "https://hashnode.com/posts/learning-rust-in-2023-a-call-for-discussion/63af6447a56a4023c181bd02/comment/63b0979d42ec5647dfa04466"
---

[Discussion](https://hashnode.com/posts/learning-rust-in-2023-a-call-for-discussion/63af6447a56a4023c181bd02)

Comment [Learning Rust in 2023: A Call For Discussion](https://hashnode.com/posts/learning-rust-in-2023-a-call-for-discussion/63af6447a56a4023c181bd02)

[waterlubber](https://hashnode.com/@waterlubber)

[Dec 31, 2022](https://hashnode.com/posts/learning-rust-in-2023-a-call-for-discussion/63af6447a56a4023c181bd02/comment/63b0979d42ec5647dfa04466)

I started a couple of years ago and ran into the classic learning wall that others hit as well. I think a major issue, personally, was that I had very little CS background, or experience with serious programming. My previous programming experience had been small programs written largely by example, e.g arduino style C++ or tiny python scripts, and I understood very little about what was going on.

Rust was a slap in the face, but also extremely helpful. It's a language that generally doesn't "tolerate" a surface-level understanding of how to write it, but instead demands a deeper understanding of exactly what you're doing. This is probably why it's so difficult to learn - you can ignore hundreds and hundreds of parts of C++, but you need to learn them in Rust.

I also struggled with learning the idiomatic patterns and higher-level behaviors of the language. Some patterns in code, like iterators that mutate things or self-referential structs, tend to quickly balloon in complexity. Even if I understood the examples in the book, dealing with the incredibly complexity when you walk into these traps is tremendously difficult.

Nonetheless, I find Rust to be one of the _easiest_ languages to truly learn. It's very easy to get started in Python or even C/C++, but to master them is extremely difficult. Rust has a clear, well-written, readable reference. It's got a book that walks you through the most difficult concepts. There's also a benefit in that its search results are _far_ less noisy - "how to do X in Rust" returns much more useful results than "how to do X in C++", which typically returns poorly written code (and articles that GPT could do a better job with.)