My feeling is that Java / C++ / Python / Javascript are all really the same language when you get down to it. Rust borrows from OCaml more than an other popular imperative languages (the first implementatoin by Graydon Hoare was in OCaml, so the inspirations abound), and therefore it really is quite different to a lot of devs who have never seen the functional paradigm. Good rust is written as a mix of imperative with a strong functional flavoring. Bad Rust is when you try to do everything by mutating arrays over iteration as you would do in imperative languages.
For me, I almost never write "for loops" and "if statements" in Rust; instead I use "functional iterators" and "match expressions", which interface with the borrow checker more nicely.
For example, iterating over an array while modifying it is a common pattern in imperative languages that compiles fine but often causes hard to reason about logic errors during runtime. In Rust, such a thing would cause compile time errors. So instead you rewrite to be more functional, it compiles, and then the magic is it just works, which is a common property of functional languages like Haskell.
IMO a lot of the consternation about the cost of the learning curve is because developers haven't realized once you get past it, the benefit is your code more often is just correct and therefore you run into fewer runtime bugs. In other languages you get the code compiling faster, but then you spend a great deal of time debugging things at runtime which you didn't anticipate at compile time.
For me, I almost never write "for loops" and "if statements" in Rust; instead I use "functional iterators" and "match expressions", which interface with the borrow checker more nicely.
For example, iterating over an array while modifying it is a common pattern in imperative languages that compiles fine but often causes hard to reason about logic errors during runtime. In Rust, such a thing would cause compile time errors. So instead you rewrite to be more functional, it compiles, and then the magic is it just works, which is a common property of functional languages like Haskell.
IMO a lot of the consternation about the cost of the learning curve is because developers haven't realized once you get past it, the benefit is your code more often is just correct and therefore you run into fewer runtime bugs. In other languages you get the code compiling faster, but then you spend a great deal of time debugging things at runtime which you didn't anticipate at compile time.