Changing code when you barely understand the language

Changing code when you barely understand the language

The other thing to bear in mind is that different languages have different challenge levels when you're not very good at them. At one extreme, you have languages where just about everything you could reasonably consider "language source code" is accepted by implementations as "valid" code, and if you barely understand the language, it's really hard to avoid making mistakes.

At the other extreme, you have languages where the compiler will definitely complain if you make a change that won't work, and thus it's a lot easier to avoid making mistakes because the compiler tells you that what you've implemented is not going to work.

And in the middle of those two extremes, we have real languages, where some things that won't work cause the compiler to complain (such as including a file that doesn't exist like #include <linus/asm.h>), while other things that won't work compile and fail later.

The interesting question is whether Rust is strict enough that someone with good C skills and minimal Rust skills can be confident that the Rust toolchain will complain if they make the "obvious" fix, but it's wrong, or whether they have to learn more Rust so that they can do the checks themselves (or ask someone else to check their work).