I'm not sure that's fair.

There are certain languages which are different enough from traditional semantics to need an explanation. While others are similar enough to be "obvious" if you've used a semantically similar language before.

To give a specific example, Powershell. It is semantically a very different scripting language from almost anything else in the market. Extremely well designed and powerful, but you'll want to sit down and read an actual book on how it works to get to handle on it because you won't have the mental map already to do so.

Overall this is why the programming language market is so predisposed for new languages looking and feeling like old languages. People just aren't comfortable stepping too far outside of their comfort zone semantically (even if they'll happily do so for a few new language features and libraries).

Yeah one of the best things about Go is how familiar it is, you can pick it up and run with it very quickly.

One of the best things about Rust is that it's a paradigm change, it takes time to get your mind around it but it is worth it if the language fits your use case.

> People just aren't comfortable stepping too far outside of their comfort zone semantically (even if they'll happily do so for a few new language features and libraries).

I'm not sure that's fair. It seems more likely that people who choose "boring" languages do so because they have things to build, and want to pick a language with a good risk/reward value. Not out of some academic interest or comfort calculation.

I believe he's saying that the Rust book[0] is very good (and completely free).

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/

I think that focusing on how long it takes to be productive is a mistake, within reason at least. How well does it hold up once I'm knowledgeable with the language matters a lot more. If it takes me 4 days or 3 weeks to be productive, ok, that's fine, but it needs to be a good solution once I'm there, because I'll spend years using it potentially.

The really, really important thing about the time it takes to be productive in a language is selling the language to other people. If it takes 3 weeks to learn enough Rust to make interesting projects, then it's going to be absolute hell convincing a team of largely ambivalent co-workers to use Rust, because 3 weeks is equivalent to months of weekend tinkering. You're restricted to using Rust either when it has mass adoption, it interests your devs, or the domain needs provable safety guarantees.

On the other hand, if someone can pick up Go and produce a side project with two weekends worth of messing around, they're much more likely to be supportive of the language.

Obviously this isn't ideal, but I don't know how you'd fix the problem.

Do you really want people on your team who think that having to read a free book and investing 3 weeks to learn a new language is too much of an effort?

Firstly, when the initial impression of a language is that it's not fast to code in, people seem to assume that it will remain unproductive in regular use. This is clearly the case with ESR, and is a problem that's relevant to the Rust community in general.

Secondly, as per the Rolling Stones, you can't always get what you want.

Maybe they are spending those three weeks learning something else. There are thousands of things that "every programmer should know" and thousands more that "every human should know", and you will never have time to learn them all.

It may very well be out of your hands. I wasn't able to convince my coworkers to use Kotlin for an android app, even though at the end of the day I was the only one coding it. And Kotlin takes a few hours to pick up if you know Java.

Sometimes you don't have a choice. You don't want those people but they are forced on you.

It's strange the short term focus that is accepted in what are nominally professionals.

If you've come from an ML background you'd need a good book to be productive in Go, and jump straight into Rust. Go is more C-like which makes it easier to pick up coming from C, not absolutely easier.