Steve Klabnik: Node enabled an entire generation of programmers who would only ever be "front end devs" that only have done a little bit of jquery and enabled them to write backend code. That was a new superpower for them. This whole group of people now have this ability to do this brand new thing in computing. We've seen those fantastic things sort of fall out of that with all these new people getting excited. What i'm hoping is that if you've never done system programming before that Rust will be able to help ease you into doing this kind of low level programming.
Yehuda Katz: One thing that you can bet will happen is the exact same thing that happened with node is that there's all those people out there who are already system programmers, just like there were all these people who were already backend programmers, and they didn't get the enabling power of node. You'll hear people say "I don't understand why Rust is so important, i can do all this stuff with C++". "Look at my C++ code i'm already doing all that rust already does". Those people will be missing the point. They'll be missing the point that Rust is enabling people who previously couldn't write C++. Unlike node, I actually think that Rust is genuinly an improvement for C++ programmers. You can expect that people will miss the point because this is the story of enabling technology. Any time there's a technology that enables a group of people who weren't good at something that other people were already doing. The people who are already doing it saying I don't see the point of this, this seems pointless. and something like "do you really want all these people coming in?" For me the answer is always YES. I always want all these people who felt intimidated by a technology to go in and actually have the power to do the right thing.