FWIW,after spending a couple of years with rust as my primary programming language, I'm convinced that they made the right decision wrt mutability (immutable by default, but mutability availale when needed), as rust's lifetime system eliminates nearly all the remaining pain points around mutability (data races).

On the other hand, I think it is very important that some notion of purity be incorporated, even if only as an opt-in.

> spending a couple of years with rust as my primary programming language

Oh, how did you achieve that? :)

Probably not with too much difficulty. 1.0's alpha was nearly 2 years ago. The github repo goes back to mid 2010: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors

See also https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory

I didn't want to imply that Rust is to young for people to have been spending years using it.

I wanted to know how you could get a Rust-job (using it as primary programming language) today :)

Ah. So, most organizations using Rust in production are moving existing employees over or hiring more generally.

I'd hit up these people: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html

Forced immutability has enormous performance downsides in some cases. Rust can't have that.