Recurse Center 1: Shuffle Iterator

This post is pretty stream of consciousness.

Thoughts on rust language and syntax so far (about ~45 hours spent studying, trickled in over the last 6 months or so).

The Hard

rust stuff that are hard for me, unfamiliar, or I haven't studied yet

• ref/stack/heap
• move/borrow
• lifetimes
• traits
• generics
• ampersand ref syntax, tick lifetime syntax
• keeping track of intermediate type conversions when chaining methods like .iter().map().collect()
• super/self unclear when/how these are OK to use, especially self

The Easy

rust stuff that is easy for me or familiar

• pub, access
• most syntax
  • function
  • let assignment
  • match
  • loop
  • if
  • most keywords
• Cargo.toml
• most cargo subcommands are clear enough for the basics
• mod keyword (mostly I think)
• Option/Some/None, Result/OK/Err (similar to elm)

The Bad

rust stuff I dislike

• double colon namespacing, one should suffice
• C-style abbreviations
• turbofish type hinter seems weird both syntax and position
  • unclear when I need an annotation before the assignment, a turbofish, or both/neither
• println macro is so verbose
• something feels weird about the use statement when bringing a trait into scope but not getting a name for that. Why is this necessary?
• I mostly don't like aliasing you can do with use. I acknowledge it's necessary but linters should check it's only used when necessary. If you alias something from the std lib just because you don't like the name, you discard a bunch of easy understanding and readability by Un-Ronsealing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Does_exactly_what_it_says_on_the_tin) stuff
• attribute syntax is overly verbose
• Needing doc comments on every line. I'd so much rather just have a start and end delimiter so hard wrapping via editor tooling was easy
  • maybe make an atom plugin for this?
• attribute config language. Why is there a not(fool = "bar") syntax instead of foo != bar like actual rust

The Good

rust stuff I like

• lower_snake_case for most things
• both separating external API tests but keeping internal unit tests in the same file as the code feel good to me
• benchmarking support baked in, not that I've ever benchmarked anything, but it's cool

Notes and Questions from Today

• don't skim the rust by example snippets, read them line by line or you'll miss key stuff
• are super and self always referring to module scopes?
• I'm losing/lost interest in the web because I feel like it's actively and rapidly and irrecoverably getting worse (mostly due to advertising and corporate interests) vs unix/command line which is at least a stable level of brokenness and not getting worse.
• Need a totally new-to-me coding process to deal with rust
  • First just get the type signatures right and return a hard coded basic value
  • one line at a time try to get something working, anything
  • separate src/scratch.rs file I can periodically wipe clean to have a low-context area to attempt things in isolation
• social screw ups: I referred to people as "guys" once. I'm sorry.