[aussiesnack]

> Easy is relative

In the case of programming languages, yes, it's relative to the difficulty of other PLs. I've learned many over the years, and found Rust by far the hardest (it's the only one that defeated me). And it's not the most different from others I've learned - lisps are far further from the common languages than Rust is.

> I suspect a major reason I found it easy was because I didn't try to solve lifetime problems,

Well yes anything's easy if you skip the hard bits. Learn C without using pointers.

I personally didn't find ownership & borrows the hardest part - in my case it's the great complexity of many of the commonly used libraries. Rust's complexity bleeds out into the entire ecosystem (a cultural thing).

[insanitybit]

> In the case of programming languages, yes, it's relative to the difficulty of other PLs.

I've learned many many PLs at this point. Rust was one of the easiest for me.

> Well yes anything's easy if you skip the hard bits. Learn C without using pointers.

That's my entire point. Rust is not hard if you learn the easy parts first. Trying to learn everything at once is not easy, no matter the language. Once the problem becomes just learning the borrow checker it's not that big of a deal. The harder thing to do is learning the borrow checker and traits and closures and blah blah blah.