I agree with the official Rust book, but I disagree that one shouldn't learn it.
Rust, even as a learning exercise, makes you think about a lot of concepts you'd normally not notice. It is a fun language, fun to experiment with, and due to its learning curve, it'd be far less stressful to learn the basics ahead of time if you ever needed it.
I used Rust-python bindings on a small project where we didn't want to use big python math libraries for portability, but a few of our calculations ran really slow on python primitives. Re-wrote a couple functions in Rust for a 40x speedup and its fully switchable to return to the original python implementations.
Yes, it's worth looking into the language and its concepts. But I think many people feel bad for not knowing or not having tried Rust because the Rust community tends to be very vocal and not quite reserved, and I believe that's a mistake. Not knowing Rust doesn't make you a bad software engineer, as opposed to what some Rustaceans want to make you believe.
> Not knowing Rust doesn't make you a bad software engineer, as opposed to what some Rustaceans want to make you believe.
Nobody is saying this, despite what some people with overactive persecution complexes want to make you believe. As for prescribing what people should do, I will say that curiosity is an essential part of improving in any field, including software development. Learning anything at all broadens your horizons and threatens to make you better. If you don't know Rust, go ahead and learn it (or anything else that interests you); if you already know Rust, go learn something new. It would be quite silly for someone to assume that no advances to the state-of-the-art have happened since they first learned to program.
Rust, even as a learning exercise, makes you think about a lot of concepts you'd normally not notice. It is a fun language, fun to experiment with, and due to its learning curve, it'd be far less stressful to learn the basics ahead of time if you ever needed it.
I used Rust-python bindings on a small project where we didn't want to use big python math libraries for portability, but a few of our calculations ran really slow on python primitives. Re-wrote a couple functions in Rust for a 40x speedup and its fully switchable to return to the original python implementations.