110 karma · joined August 1, 2014
The Rust docs are great, but having a starting point can be super welcoming so you aren't poking around blindly at different types that might be relevant.
It made me think about pointers, and gave me insight to just how complicated strings and growable arrays are under the hood instead of just being givens like in Ruby. It simplified concurrency and parallelization enough that I was able to dive in and learn the concepts which I was then able to use to dig deeper with other languages that don't have the nice channels/select built in.
I've come to realize that, in my learning at least, there are thresholds of information that people get stuck at, but once they cross you get a flood of improvement. Go allowed me to stop thinking only within the code context, but also in the machine context. Now a large amount of my side projects are in C or Rust, and even my day job writing higher level languages has benefited greatly from the new ability to understand the moving parts. It's not going to give you a compsci education, but it'll give you that intermediate step you need to wade into that territory.
Do I know the conventions or idioms? No. Do I know the advanced features of Nim? I sincerely doubt it. But I know Python, and seeing the syntax written out is enough for me to correct my informed guesses in how to write it.
I doubt I could use it to pick up Haskell or a language whose paradigm I was unfamiliar with though.
Can anyone point me to any papers/documentation/discussion on WHY certain syntax decisions were made? Many could have been arbitrary choices to match the constructs, but the way the community presents itself makes me think there's more to it.
Do you plan on accepting pull requests? I'd love to contribute to something like this.
Would it be better to use Python or Javascript which more people understand but still has that functional flair? Just an idea. Either way I look forward to reading it!