Why Rust? Why now?
WIP
When I first heard about Rust I figured it was just Golang, but with a bit of a syntactical difference. Truly my ignorance knew no bounds.
This would have been around 2021-2022. By that point I'd spent enough time in my career around loosely typed, dynamic languages like PHP, and Ruby. Previously I'd spent time at university - and before - in languages like C, and Java.
As a junior programmer starting my career the loosely typed languages were a breath of fresh air. "Finally!" I thought, I can move fast and break things like all those cool kids in all those startups. None of this useless typing system getting in my way. When a project is so small you can contain it in your head, there's a temptation to do away with any kind of IDE help - or any IDE at all. I know what "that thing" is, and I remember all the properties on the MyClass I pass around everywhere.
And it works. For a time.
Inevitably the project which started out looking like a human sprouts a tentacle, some wheels, a folding deck chair, and then another half of a much older humanoid.
It's getting harder to remember the methods on MyClass and all its subclasses (because of course I've subclassed everything). I'm still tracking 90% of where I call that global helper method I made to Do The Thing.
Then a new requirement comes in and I need to move the meatballs around in my spaghetti code. I do my best, but I break production.
I decide - with encouragement from a senior - that it's time to get an IDE; but that's as far as it'll go! I want something lightweight to go along with my lightweight language.