[dstanko]

Do you perceive Rust programmers as extraordinary?

[foofie]

Rust is renowned for imposing a high cognitive load on all but the most trivial tasks. This is perhaps the worst traits a programming language can have.

[pornel]

It’s quite the opposite. It may not be worth learning Rust for small simple programs, but it has an entire toolbox of features for dealing with complex problems and large programs.

For example, dealing with multi-threading and low-level memory management without the assistance of thread-safe types and borrow checker adds mental overhead of verifying and upholding all the requirements manually.

[steveklabnik]

This is a thing people experience at the beginning, but once you get over the hump, for many, it is not descriptive of what it's like.

[stouset]

Rust is memed for that by people who don’t actually program Rust.

In practice it is absolutely the opposite. Rust makes really challenging problems extremely tractable, and takes an enormous amount of mental overhead off the table.

[erik_seaberg]

That cognitive load around ownership and sharing already existed in C and even assembly, we were just managing it very poorly without tooling.

[frankjr]

> Rust is renowned for imposing a high cognitive load on all but the most trivial tasks.

By whom exactly? I think it's actually the exact opposite. It completely frees you from having to think about entire classes of bugs.

[jvanderbot]

I don't think GP meant that as "of extraordinary ability" just "tackling the common problems people write code for". Ordinary problems vs ordinary people.

[kybernetyk]

extraordinarily masochistic, yes