Abstract
At Code Your Future, we teach beginners from disadvantaged backgrounds to become professional software engineers. We've mostly been doing this in JavaScript, and a bit of Go.
Rust should be a great language for beginners to learn software engineering. Its clear and helpful error messages, its APIs designed to guide you towards correct usage and avoiding mistakes, and its ease of building meaningful abstractions should let novices focus on getting things right, not falling into traps.
But Rust is a large language with many concepts and features, and most of the learning materials assume a lot of software or computer science knowledge and familiarity.
This talk explores our experiences of teaching software engineering, what makes Rust hard for beginners to approach, and invites individuals to volunteer with us, and companies to partner with us to help us prove that Rust can be a great learning language.
