Enjoy! I don't know what you used to seriously program on but I am willing to bet that the ownership paradigm that it enforces is going to feel at least moderately new to you, unless you forced yourself to code that way anyways.

Thinking about ownership is the right way e.g. for C++ as well, so if one has coded professionally in larger systems, it should not be too alien.

One still needs to learn life time annotations. So, assuming that you know, for example, C++, it is an a bit larger hurdle than picking up Java or Go, but it is worth the time.

In many aspects, Rust is far more productive and also more beginner-friendly than C++:

• far better compiler error messages
• a superb and easy-to-use packaging system
• Unicode support
• support for unit testing right in the language
• strong support for a side-effect-free or "functional programming" style which is great for testing and tasks like data analysis or parsing
• better modularization
• avoids implementation inheritance, and the trait system is a bit different but superb
• no undefined behavior (in safe Rust) which means nothing less than that the code does what it says - and this is extremely useful in larger projects
• great support for safe concurrency
• the language and library frees one to think about interfaces and algorithms which is where the big wins for performance are hidden (and IMO one of the key factors for the astounding success of Python).

I could go on... but I need to do other stuff