> a real hunger for a type-heavy and memory-safe low level / systems programming language, and Rust had the bones of it.

I didn't know I wanted this, but yes, I did want this and when I got it I was much more enthusiastic than I'd ever been about languages like Python or Java.

I bounced off Go, it's not bad but it didn't do anything I cared about enough to push through all the usual annoyances of a new language, whereas Rust was extremely compelling by the time I looked into it (only a few years ago) and has only improved since.