sometimes it feels like Rust was created by

• looking at every notoriously hard-to-understand language that already exists
• taking just the parts that are hardest to understand
• cramming them all together in a single language
• creating brand new hard-to-understand things on top of that
• making sure that all of the hard-to-understand things interact with each other as much as possible

like okay so you have:

• macros from Lisp
• immutability and monads from functional programming
• crazy mind-bending OOP statically-typed stuff from Java
• also everything is as low-level and fiddly as C
• plus all of the brain-melting eldritch things that are uniquely Rust

like it genuinely kinda makes me appreciate C more because at least I can look at individual lines of C code and tell you What It Does without needing a PhD in type theory

if you told me that Rust was invented by the King in Yellow or fucking Azathoth I would believe you because no human mind could conceive of Rust’s {pointers but not pointers but pass-by-reference except not pass-by-reference except…}

@kasdeya Yeah . . . this is a thing we struggled with a decent bit when learning it

The thing we think makes it hard to transfer existing knowledge is that "ownership" is less about the mechanics of how it is accessed, and more about logical analysis by the compiler

@kasdeya Honestly I spent year trying to learn Rust, tried using it for a project, then decided that wasn't the play lol. I have had so much more fun with lisp instead.

@tempest yeah I honestly have such a hard time understanding what it means for something to be a reference lol. you can treat it like a value, except sometimes. you can treat it like a pointer to a value, except sometimes. also sometimes it doesn’t act like either of those things. and the specifics of when it’s treated like any of these three categories seems to depend on the specific type that it’s pointing to. it’s maddening