Learning Rust: How Experienced Programmers Leverage Resources to Learn a New Programming Language

Experienced programmers are capable of learning new programming languages independently using various available resources, but we lack a comprehensive understanding of which resources they find most valuable in doing so. In this paper, we study how experienced programmers learn Rust, a systems programming language with extensive documentation and example code, an active online community, and descriptive compiler errors. We develop a task that requires learning Rust syntax and comprehending the Rust-specific approach to mutability and ownership. Our results show that users spend 43% of online time viewing example code and that programmers appreciate in-line compiler errors, choosing to refresh, on average, every 30.6 seconds after first discovering this feature. The average time between these refreshes predicted total task time, but individual resource choices did not. Based on our findings we offer design implications for language and IDE developers.