Austin admitted in his first post on Rust that he prefers to learn a language by coding than by reading. Various people pointed out to him that this doesn't work very well for Rust--its claim to fame is using non-obvious concepts that solve really tricky problems.

In his "wow now that I've built it, this is pretty great" second post, he admits that he was too hard on Rust because he actually was seeing the benefits after the struggle (insanely fast, can refactor with confidence, etc.).