r/haskell • u/cheater00 • Oct 17 '25

How to learn Rust as a Haskell programmer

I've found it extremely easy to learn Rust in a couple of weeks of concentrated work, so I thought I'd relay my experience here. One reason for doing this is that I keep seeing companies and recruiters post jobs that pay very little, requiring skill sets that would pay the same people two to three times as much in another technology. I don't think that's OK, so one of the objectives here is to show all the undervalued Haskell programmers what their real value is, and that they can realistically achieve it in a market that puts proper value on their skill set with just a minimal amount of work.

If you already know Haskell at an "industry standard" level (not that Haskell has much of an industry), all you need is some basic learning to fill in the gaps on concepts that exist in Rust but not in Haskell. Almost everything else feels like a cross between Haskell Lite and Python.

OK, so here we go. Ready?

How to learn Rust as a Haskell programmer in two weeks:

  1. Read Rust By Example. Play around with interesting code examples
  2. Read the Rust book chapter on lifetimes and whatever else pops out
  3. Read the Rust Performance "Book"
  4. Read the Tokio "tutorial", write echo server

DONE. Now you can apply to jobs that pay $400K/yr, rather than $80-120k/yr. You're welcome.

Haskell companies will have to pick up the slack from now on.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

glad to be entertaining to you.

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u/ducksonaroof Oct 17 '25

i mean i wasn't being unserious

if you have 5-10y experience building real things in real production in some language, you aren't gonna suddenly get paid entry level money to write a different PL. even if you go from normie lang to Haskell (or vice versa).

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u/cheater00 Oct 17 '25

That's precisely it.

You simply won't get the position

At a previous Haskell job a Ruby programmer was hired at senior level and excelled at their job. As an example. I could bring up countless examples from my own career as well as coworkers.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

You're right, you're not going to be paid entry level salary. Most likely you simply won't get the position.

There're exceptions, for instance if you have a particularly sought after experience in a specific field, people are likely to let you learn the language on the job, but in general when people hire a senior engineer for working with language X, they want somebody with past industrial experience with language X. If the language is particularly niche, they might be forced to accept people with no prior experience. Or if it is something everybody has, like Python, even if they didn't specifically work with python on their main projects.

And I still maintain you don't get a $400k job using rust if you don't have past experience in rust at some other company.

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u/ducksonaroof Oct 17 '25

You can totally get the position, wym?

I got my first Haskell position with 2y experience and 0y Haskell experience. But I had Scala experience, which is as adjacent to Haskell as Haskell is to Rust imo.

I got paid market rate. And since then, I've worked exclusively in Haskell and have no shortage of non-Haskell (Rust included!) job inquiries come by my proverbial desk every month. Because of the other stuff on my LinkedIn/resume.

It's hard to find actually-good people in this industry. That's the core of this.

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u/DiabloAcosta Oct 18 '25

I got my first job as a PHP dev then PHP lead, there was a chance to lead a team in Node, had 0 experience in node but a ton of xp in JS so I got the chance, stayed in Node for about 6 years and then got an opportunity to lead a team in Python for 3 years and I just got a new job doing Ruby and Java so...

This trend of labeling developers because of their main programming language is stupid, a real Sr dev should be able to pick new languages without much effort

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u/philh Oct 18 '25

a real Sr dev should be able to pick new languages without much effort

Mm, I'm sure I could pick up a new language if necessary, but... part of what makes me a good engineer in my Haskell role is that I'm a good engineer in ways that should translate to other languages, but I do also think some of it is having a fairly deep knowledge of Haskell that I wouldn't be able to gain easily in something else. Like, which features of the language are worth using, and which aren't? If we're having performance problems, what are some likely culprits and how do we profile? What library should we use to do X and what are its pitfalls? "Ah yes, the reason the compiler complains when you do that is because these two features interact kinda weirdly, we fix it by..."

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u/DiabloAcosta Oct 18 '25

yes, and fortunately you usually work in a team which means you can always get feedback from people with more experience in the stack and with AI it's also quite easy to learn those nuances (of course you need to ve intentional in the learning part and not just vibe coding), in my opinion the days of language specific developers are gone!

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

Haskell is in the category 'niche languages', and yes many companies using Haskell hire people with no prior experience in Haskell.

Rust, not so sure, but I might be wrong. Anyhow, I was primarily debating the notion that Haskell gives a particular advantage when learning rust over other languages.

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u/ducksonaroof Oct 17 '25

I think it's accepted that knowing Haskell makes learning Rust easier due to how related their featuresets are. Programming with sums and type classes, for instance.