Analogies to explain Rust's concepts/philosophies

[blonk]

A long time ago I saw a Tom Scott video about language (spoken/written ones) features, where he mentioned that there's at least one language that only has absolute directions (north, south, east, west), but not relative directions (left, right, forward, backward). This has the down-side that you always need to keep track of what direction n, s, e, w are [at your current position] -- but the upside is that you won't run into the classic "go left", "whose left?" when carrying furniture.

This was one of the first penny-drop moments I had when I started understanding what Rust was attempting to do: The idea is to make certain classes of bugs unexpressable, in the same way that the "go left", "whose left?" "bug" can't be expressed in a language that does not use relative directions.

I like this analogy for other reasons as well; it demonstrates that such language features come with both pros and cons. But more importantly, it's an analogy that isn't super convoluted, and non-programmers can grasp the basic idea.

Are there any analogies that were particularly helpful to you to understand Rust concepts/philosophies?

[2e71828]

Rust Koans​​​​​

Obstacles For the eighth day in a row, Neophyte Col found himself standing before the Two Great Guards of the temple. They stood before the large entrance of the temple, clad in simple robes. Nevertheless, they were imposing, and feared. He strode toward the first guard, confident, and handed the parchment bearing his program. The First Guard read through it carefully. This step was but a formality; yesterday, he had only failed to gain the assent of the Second Guard. He was certain he ha…

[kornel]

I don't have any helpful analogies, since for Rust it's necessary to understand the technical details more precisely than analogies convey.

However, Rust has been helpful to me by providing a vocabulary to talk about memory management design patterns (owned vs borrowed, loan scopes), and thread safety. For example, Send and Sync describe patterns of thread safety requirements, that in other languages are usually described in prose that is more ad-hoc and may be less precise.