A month ago, I wrote about how I was frustrated with my progress in Rust. These days, I’m still no expert, but I’ve made progress.

Programming languages get easier to learn the more of them you know. A lot of this is just pattern matching: syntax changes, but there’s a lot of overlap in features, and the similarities get more apparent. Some of my recent acquisitions have been very fast to learn – with Go, I was writing functional code within hours, and had a solid grasp of the ecosystem and conventions within a few weeks.

Rust is in its own league. I’m about five months into writing it on a pretty frequent basis, and its taken this long to internalize a lot of its ideas. This is especially true when it comes to the more complicated ones like moves and futures, but also true for simpler ones like borrows. What I didn’t know when I wrote about it in frustration a month ago is that it doesn’t take a little longer to be effective in Rust compared to other languages, it takes 10 to 20 times longer.

But that learning curve isn’t without its benefits. When I’m working with languages with poor guarantees (e.g., Ruby, JavaScript), I see myself building a sand castle on the beach with the tide coming in around me. While I’m focused on finishing one part of the structure, the rest of it is being worn away by the rising waters of time and entropy. The whole only retains some semblance of form as long as I diligently rush from one part of it to another, reshaping each of them before they disintegrate into the sea.

Using compiled languages feels like I’m no longer building out of sand. In Go or C#, between a test suite and the compiler’s guarantees, I rest easier knowing that the code that works today is probably going to work tomorrow. Entropy is still taking its toll, but more slowly.

Rust is another step into the beyond. When finishing a feature and its test suite I’ll run my program to see it in action, but just as a formality – I already know it works. I also know that it’s going to keep working because meticulousness of the compiler is so good at catching regressions. My castle on the beach is made from steel. Entropy will swallow it eventually, but on a totally different scale of time.

The older I get, the more value I see in these sorts of guarantees. Software is partly a production problem, but it’s mainly a maintenance problem. Powerful primitives like Rust are our path to building sustainable services that don’t need human attention around the clock, and which can be expected to operate reliably over epochs measured in decades instead of weeks.