I have actually been a proponent for Rust as First Language at the university I work for. However today our first year CS students are taught Python as their First Language, with I believe an option to learn Rust among others much later.
The two most important/ prestigious universities here, Oxford and Cambridge as I understand it both teach an ML as First Language, teaching Rust would arguably qualify (Rust is basically an ML but with spelling familiar to a C or Java programmer) but with the caveat that one reason they teach an ML first (and indeed so did the place where I got my degree) is that some of the 18 year olds in your class know C or Java or indeed Python, but they almost certainly do not know Ocaml or SML or whatever - whereas they might know Rust.
And that sort of gets to where your parent was thinking. On the whole it's not that university (or "college") teaches Rust, but that because Rust is a good first language some people will have just acquired Rust anyway. I came to Rust as somebody with decades of C and Java and some Python, Go, and a long list of languages, but today plenty of learners just pick up Rust themselves.
I do not even have CS degree or programming background. But Rust seemed easier to learn than C or C++. Well I've learned C syntax in a day but really using it is different story. Rust gave me confidence to contribute to existing (open-source) project pretty early.
tialaramex|8 months ago
The two most important/ prestigious universities here, Oxford and Cambridge as I understand it both teach an ML as First Language, teaching Rust would arguably qualify (Rust is basically an ML but with spelling familiar to a C or Java programmer) but with the caveat that one reason they teach an ML first (and indeed so did the place where I got my degree) is that some of the 18 year olds in your class know C or Java or indeed Python, but they almost certainly do not know Ocaml or SML or whatever - whereas they might know Rust.
And that sort of gets to where your parent was thinking. On the whole it's not that university (or "college") teaches Rust, but that because Rust is a good first language some people will have just acquired Rust anyway. I came to Rust as somebody with decades of C and Java and some Python, Go, and a long list of languages, but today plenty of learners just pick up Rust themselves.
globalnode|8 months ago
timeon|8 months ago