December 2015 - ClickedyClick

2015 – Results

This year have seen a long trip to Europe in February (Hungary, Prague, Vienna) which definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things that I probably should have understood back in high school (especially regarding history). On the other hand, I was a visitor back in my home country Hungary too, and tried a bunch of things that I have never tried when I lived there before, been there with different eyes (and would love to spend more time home again too).

The rest of the year was spent here in Taiwan, on small trips all around the north and east coast, and around Taipei City. A lot can fit into day trips, and it is fun to mix popular places with off the beaten track.

Every now and then I do a “Language of the Month” feature when I spend one month to learn a new programming language. This last month in November I’ve spent with Rust, and it’s time to take stock. Will look at the impression I had in this short time, show one project that I get done in Rust, and some ideas what I’d like to do with Rust in the future!

Experience

According to my time log, I have spent about 20 hours this month learning Rust. That’s way too little to have a good understanding, but definitely enough to have some educated guesses (and excitement, and horror , as appropriate). This time I’m generally very impressed as Rust comes across as indeed a very modern and smart language, although that modernness is mostly in the tooling and non-essential parts. It is also changing very quickly, for good and bad. Here are some, admittedly subjective and incomplete list of observations. Good is what I like, Bad what’s less nice IMHO, and Ugly is what’s imperfect or confusing (at this stage of my Rust learning):

Good

It’s great to see that documentation is a not an afterthought, but a core part, that is making use a lot of modern development experience. Having a standard way to include example code in docstrings and actual tests are run on them to make sure the examples are also up-to-date with the code is a very cool concept. Also being able to auto-generate HTML documentation from the code is probably going to be standard in most new languages (I think Go does that also, and other languages have gained similar optional tools)