Hector Martin

if your language is difficult for newbies to pick up and understand, that's _a problem with your language_ like, it's a problem other languages have too (you won't hear me saying C++ is easy), but that doesn't somehow make it a positive aspect

like, this guy's arguing that you should read _three entire reference books_ before you start writing your own code and ahahahahahahaha also he has no idea how to write a damn twitter thread, these tweets are split at random mid-sentence

also while C++ has a lot of complexity, and _certainly_ has a lot of awkward edge cases and footguns, almost everything you're likely to use is built on top of a few basic core mechanics that are easy to understand

like, you can build ridiculously complex things on top of templates, but the template system really isn't that complex in itself you can look at pretty much any standard type and understand what's going on under the hood

I feel like you can say pretty much the same thing about almost any concept though. It's usually the implications or combinations of them that are complex. I certainly was able to just stumble my way into knowing Rust so I don't think it's that special

to be clear I don't know how complex rust actually is as compared to anything else; I haven't used it myself I just don't think "well you're gonna have to read these 3 books and then you'll have the gist and be able to get started" should be reasonable advice, and I hope it's not

The issue with Rust is that it's arguably harder to learn as an experienced programmer. Like he says, I'm used to skimming the guide/examples and jumping right in to writing complex code in $newlanguage. That doesn't work with Rust.

Simple examples are easy, and my first Rust program was actually a moderately complex socket proxy/mux thing which wasn't too hard to write. But now I'm trying to design a key-value store abstraction layer for a large project in Rust and still haven't figured out the lifetimes.