Programming

It only took me ~2 weeks of playing with Rust before it became my scripting language of choice over Python (which I had been using casually for ~5 years by that point).

The initial setup for Rust can be whipped up with $ cargo init. You're right that there's more setup boilerplate because of the mandatory Cargo.toml and directory structure, but cargo init will provide all that in a snap.

As for the domain specific boilerplate, I actually find that Rust is better at that than Python in almost all cases. I feel that Rust's clap is much simpler, more reliable, and less boilerplate than Python's argparse. Python might win in cases where there's a very mature domain specific package that you need which isn't available in the Rust ecosystem, but that's becoming rare as crates.io grows.

And then when it comes to the actual "scripting", very often my IDE's intellisense can practically fill in the Rust code for me. One keystroke per word and it knows what function I want, or I can quickly scroll through the recommendations until I find what I'm looking for. Meanwhile with Python I always have to consult docs to find any API that isn't part of the basic standard library. As a result I'll often get the scripting done faster in Rust than in Python.

It does absolutely take some time to reach that point, though. Most programmers will definitely feel significant discomfort with Rust initially, but that's just because you need to deprogram your brain from the bad habits that other languages encourage. There's a tipping point in that deprogramming where all the other languages start to feel uncomfortable because you know it won't let you write as good quality of code as Rust would.

For quickly throwing together a small script, a developer equivalently experienced in Python and Rust will likely find Python faster to use

I am not sure about that. I have written a few scripts in rust that I managed to do quite quickly. Once you have a project similar to what you have done before setup time is not that long and the more examples of things you have done before lets you get going quite quickly - this is true of any language really. The slowest part I tend to find is learning the libraries you need to use for a given script or doing something you have not quite done before. Which I think in rust it can take a bit longer for these parts - but once you have overcome that hurdle similar scripts are easier to write in the future. Python might win out if you constantly need to write things from scratch with no past examples and always needing to use new unfamiliar libraries. But I find that is not often the case and over time becomes less and less the case.

And for those cases where you can just adapt something you have written before rusts very easy refactoring actually adds a lot of value and helps to speed things up quite a bit. Though it does take quite a lot more knowledge with the language to get to that point that it does with python I think.

yes, I've seen how mangled python code can be, some of the code that our automation team uses barely makes use of functions or classes, which has made working on other people's python code a nightmare. There's one application that is thousands of lines long that I'm pretty sure I could condense into a few hundred lines.

Perhaps that's a drawback of people who use python, they are not typically focused on the scalability of their code until it is actually used in prod. I believe for this reason, I would prefer a language that is compiled.

Last question, is using Rust on Windows as difficult as it seems at face value? It looked like to me that for using rust, it's preferable to use linux or mac, as they don't require you to install a compiler. For some reason, my org requires me to submit an exception for being able to install rust on my work computer. Is there anything that is inherently risky about using Rust, or is it because once the code is compiled, it cannot be reverse engineered?