Comment by sfink

I was Basic (on C64) -> assembly -> Pascal -> C, more or less. 0-based indexing wasn't too bad for me, except when it came to for loops.

    for (i=0; i<length; i++)

I eventually just memorized that pattern, but stumbled every time any part of it changed. I had to rethink the whole logic every time to figure out < vs <= and length vs length-1, and usually ended up getting an answer that was both confident and wrong.

The borrow checks feels similar but different. It feels like it has more "levels" to it. Initially, it came naturally to me and I wondered what all the fuss was about. I was fighting iterators and into, not the borrow checker. I just had to mentally keep track of what owned my data and it all felt pretty obvious.

Then I started working on things that didn't fit into my naive mental model, and it became a constant fight.

So overall, a similar experience to 0-based indexing, yes. (Except I still don't "just know" the trickier bits of the borrow checker yet, so I don't know what comes next.)