While I respect the author's anecdote, this doesn't match my experience. I've been programming for 20+ years across a wide array of languages and I'm by far the most productive in Rust.
With a competent teacher, experienced devs should be able to pick up on the memory model pretty quickly, and that is really the only initial blocker to productivity. After that a dev can essentially write procedural code if they want, like other common languages, while refining their thinking and practices towards idiomatic Rust.
I agree mostly with this, however, ownership can be strange in Rust if you’re not familiar with it. Something simple like a linked list can be challenging to implement.
To expand this a little, the perception that linked lists are easy comes from the fact that the garbage collector does all the heavy lifting on the background. Using a non-GC language reveals the complexities involved.
how can you be more productive in rust, where you do have to worry about object lifetimes than in languages where you don't, and where you can focus more on algorithms, say java?
1. I'm familiar with lifetimes and they don't slow me down anymore. Also, I usually structure my projects such that I don't need to explicitly express them.
2. I spend a lot less time fixing bugs because Rust makes them impossible.
Because the time you spend thinking about lifetimes is insignificant compared to the time you save by not having to fix bugs that lifetimes prevented from ever existing.
With a competent teacher, experienced devs should be able to pick up on the memory model pretty quickly, and that is really the only initial blocker to productivity. After that a dev can essentially write procedural code if they want, like other common languages, while refining their thinking and practices towards idiomatic Rust.