cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/5850736
This is the resource I’ve been looking for. I’m working my way through the book but it gets in the weeds really early. It’s all fun and games and then chapter 4 just hits like a brick wall. Amos does a tremendous job explaining the why behind things, in a more wheels to the pavement way.
I’ve just started learning Rust, mostly by experimenting with winapi since that what’s I’m mostly going to use it for anyway, but this finally explains why I had so much trouble with trying to intuitively winging it. I’ve skimmed through the Rust book once, but judging by this article it’s no wonder I was mostly wrestling the compiler.
Looks like I have to go back to the drawing board. I understand why is Rust doing it, and I’m sure that once I finally get used to it, it’s going to be a way smoother experience, but maan, this is the first language I couldn’t just figure out in an hour. It’s a frustrating learning experience, but I also see why it’s neccessary and love it for that.
I’ve had a few challenging moments for sure but I’m really loving it. I come javascript mostly with a fair amount of ruby experience, and C++ dating back to college. C++ was by far more difficult to learn, but this was like 15 years ago and learning resources have changed drastically since then. To me Rust feels like low level Ruby. I think it takes some good DX cues from Ruby.
I’ve been mostly working in C# for the past few years (and most of my life), and the only C++ experience I have is from college, so it’s getting some using to. And that’s what I was getting at - thanks to college, where I was forced to really learn (or at least, understand and be able to use) a wide range of drastically different languages, from Lisp through Bash, Pharo, Prolog, to Java and C#, that when I have to write something in a language I don’t know, it’s usually similar to at least one of them and I always could figure it out intuitively.
With Rust, even though it has an amazing compiler, I’m struggling - probably because of the borrowing and overly careful error handling being concepts I’ve never had to deal with to get a MVP code working. Sure, that probably means that the code wasn’t error-proof, which is exactly what Rust forces you to do and which is amazing, but it makes it a lot harder to just write a single script without prior knowledge when you have to.
I hope they are teaching Rust at universities now, we definitely didn’t have it 8 years ago, which is a shame.