Hey, You! Should You Start With Rust Programming Language?
Rust is becoming more popular day by day. There are a number of people out there who are wondering if they should choose rust as their first programming language.
There is a lot of debate on this topic on Reddit and other sites. If you want to read all those opinions, good luck to you. But it all comes down to two things:
- No! you shouldn’t use it as your first language, because it’s a really hard language to learn and you may lose your motivation to get into the programming world because of it.
- Yes, you should because if you don’t then you will pick up bad habits from other programming languages. And if you have bad habits, then you will have a hard time in the production world.
Let me first explain what are the “bad habits” that they are talking about. As far as I am concert there are a couple of them →
- First, the rust borrow checker doesn’t allow you to simply pass anything around to anybody. It reduces the amount of change that happens in a program and makes you be explicit about where things will change. This simply leads you to fewer bugs. Popular languages like JavaScript or Python, allow you to mutate things at any level. So sometimes your program will shoot itself in the foot because you have written a buggy code.
- Second, there’s a thing called ‘NULL’. All the popular languages have it. Rust handles it differently and forces you to think differently as well so that the program will be safe at runtime.
So should you learn rust as your first programming language?
Personally, I think, NO! You shouldn’t. My reason isn’t technical. Yes, I think rust makes you blazingly fast, yes the rust programming language allows you to write safer code, yes the rust handles ‘NULL’ more superiorly than any other programming language that I have tried.
But still, I do not think rust is a great first language, and my reason being is that with rust you’re going to be confined to the command line. The average person coming into programming has probably used Windows or Mac and 99% of them are not used to the command line.
I said 99% percent because there’s always that one person who is a nerd and knows command line to it’s core. If you’re that person, congratulations! Why don’t you follow me on Medium? I am also a nerd just like you.
Coming back to the point, most of you don’t know the command line. The Command line is dull and exceptionally complicated at the same time. And with rust, you will be looking at those command-line error messages all the time. And, also you’re going to run a lot of commands all the time.
On the other hand, you can start with something like Javascript, HTML, or CSS and you can see all the stuff that you’re writing. You can feel it. You will see the progress yourself.
Ultimately the goal is to learn PROGRAMMING. Well, the ultimate goal is to get a job and sip some coffee at the office of course. DUH! and for that to happen you have to keep learning.
With rust, it will a lot difficult to keep learning it. Believe me. Experts, yes even persons with 10 years of experience keep quitting rust because of its error messages on the command line. It will make you feel worse every time.
Listen, you need fun while learning something like programming. It’s all about fun. With Javascript or Python, you’ll have it.
But will you have the best foundational knowledge that you need from learning JavaScript or Python? No! you won’t. Don’t bother about the foundational topic at the beginning. Focus on grasping basic knowledge first.
And, after you got the basic knowledge and confidence that you need, don’t stop, keep moving forward. Learn rust, go learn data structures and algorithms, go learn networking, and understand DevOps. Take your time to learn about all these different parts of programming because it will benefit you a lot.
So in conclusion, if you’re just getting started, I will recommend you to start easy (python or javascript). Sure rust is a good and safe programming language but if you start with it, I bet 99% of you will not stick with it.
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This article was written by Sk Soyeb Akhter. Take love ♥ from India.
