:: [DNG] About the rust language
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Author: Steve Litt
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: [DNG] About the rust language
I've looked into the newer languages like rust and go and Julia, and
they don't work for me.

As far as Julia, it's buggy as hell.

With go and rust, these languages seem much broader than C, Python,
Lua, old school Turbo Pascal and the like.

What I mean by "broader" is that you need to memorize a whole lot of
stuff because a whole lot of stuff is built into the language instead
of just being createable in the language.

As a counterexample, take C. C has very few commands and keywords to
remember. Learn =, ==, <, >, if, while, for, struct, typedef, arrays
and pointers and a small portion of the standard library and you're
good to go. When you need to do something, you don't search for a
command to do it, you just make it. If you didn't know about memcpy(),
you could write it in about 6 lines of C.

When I tried to learn go by taking a tutorial, the first three lessons
all went well. Then, the next few lessons required me to remember more
and more and more commands to the point where I couldn't hang.

It's a little like the difference between math and history. With math
you learn a few (perhaps difficult) principles and techniques, and all
you have to do is apply the correct techniques in the correct order to
do what you want. Very little memorization. With history, everything
has at least two parties, a date, and an outcome. Trivial to learn, but
difficult to remember. All I remember from history is that the Normans
took over England in 1066, and the US declared independence in 1776.
But I still remember enough high school and college math to be somewhat
formidable, because principles are hard to forget. C is like math, go,
and as I remember also rust, are more like history.

SteveT

Steve Litt

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http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21