Rust – A hard decision pays off

Re:Rust – A hard decision pays off by tralarpa on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @06:25PM (#32586614)

I hate that some universities teach dynamically typed languages as first language in their curriculum. I think for CS students the first language should be as "strict" (not in the mathematical sense) as possible, so the student is forced to think very carefully what is going where. This is of course a controversial opinion, especially among proponents of SICP (which is, in my opinion, not a good book for beginners. Yes, downvote me).

(Obviously, I am talking about CS students here, not about the general public who just want to learn what writing a program means)

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Re:Rust – A hard decision pays off by xhevahir on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @08:22PM (#32587722)

What language do you recommend for beginners?

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Re:Rust – A hard decision pays off by throwaway894345 on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @08:28PM (#32587766)

I think Go would make a pretty good language for beginners, but I haven't tested that theory. TypeScript might be the safer bet, especially since you can run it in the browser and see things, which is probably somewhat more gratifying than printing text to a console.

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Re:Rust – A hard decision pays off by manholio on Thursday August 25, 2022 @05:27AM (#32591463)

I would go on a limb and say Rust (or more specifically, a limited dialect of it) could become a good language for beginners if:

- the compiler had better life time inference, so that you wouldn't need to annotate simple functions and introduce beginners to complex issues related to lifetimes, i.e it should "seem" to work like python, initially.

- better learning resources for absolute beginners are developed, step by step tutorial, an easy to install full IDE with friendly error messages etc.

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