Learning fun but irrelevant things

Last week, my friend Joe asked me what's the best way to learn a programming language.

I replied: Go through the basics as quickly as possible. Then begin building things with it. This is how I learn Golang.

I had been curious about Rust for a while. And a coworker talked about how Rust was his favorite language with a lot of exuberance. I thought to myself, maybe I could do the same with Rust.

I was intimidated by “the Rust book”. It's a huge book of I don't know how many pages. And I never got past hello world and the curious exclamation mark after println.

That's when I discovered Tour of Rust after some random Googling. Tour of Rust is a pleasant introduction to the basic syntax and concepts of Rust. With a compiler on the right side of the page, it adds some nice interactivity to the tutorial. It makes it easier to understand when you can try and change things and see how it fails.

So far my feeling is a few concepts (borrowing and referencing) in Rust are quite clever. I don't understand under what circumstances lifetime needs to be managed manually. Then it feels like a few things are added as an afterthought, which leads to a certain degree of internal incongruity in its syntax.

Yet despite the tribal sentiment among Go developers and Rust developers, these languages feel more similar than different.

Curiously, after searching Rust on YouTube, the algorithm god recommended a million Elm talks with one of them promising to give you happiness.

Incidentally, I read a blog post from the Warp team about building a UI in Rust.

In a gist, it was difficult to build a UI in Rust if they followed the widget tree approach of Flutter. Because multilayers of object inheritance do not feel natural or intuitive in Rust.

Although they used a close but different approach, the Model-View-Update approach used in the Elm architecture was an inspiration for the Warp team.

To use an inaccurate analogy in React terms, Model is like Redux, it manages all the states in your entire app. View manages the virtual DOM that renders the page as the states change. Update makes changes to the state upon receiving messages (events) when the user interacts with your app. Pretty neat.

What's charming about Elm is it's easier, way easier, linting and debugging that works out of the box. You don't need to configure anything, it just works. This is so much better than React.

But you do need to learn a new language and get used to the functional programming way of thinking.

Bottom line: Rust and Elm are both fun. Don't know if or when they will be useful at work.