I've learned a lot in the 2-3 years I've spent trying to teach myself programming through Rust. I feel like Rust has forced me to learn some concepts that I would otherwise not have understood at all. That said, I keep running into the same deadends whenever I try to do any project beyond the trivial. I don't fault Rust for this in any way. It reflects my own limitations.
I recently volunteered to help a co-worker out with a scheduling problem. I ended up writing a ton of VBA code and linking it all together with some Flow recipes to automate a bunch of steps. Even though I had never written a line of VBA before, it was (relatively) easy to go from concept to finished project. And it was fun.
This experience made me realize that I really don't need to feel in control of every aspect of a program. I just want to put a thought into practice. I still need a lot of training wheels to do that, so I'm going to be taking a break from Rust.
This community has been an amazing resource. I thank everyone who has patiently answered questions or provided examples. I'm sure I'll be back when I have a need for something computationally intense or get enough experience with the shortcomings of Elixir/Python/Javascript to understand why some of the pain points in Rust are necessary and even desirable.
Cheers.
It's a shame it didn't work for you. That's not unusual — it took me embarrassingly long to learn Rust, and I was very close to giving up. For the work I do I need the control and memory efficiency of Rust, so I persevered. Rust isn't the best tool for many things, so have fun with other languages.
I gave up on my first try, then a month or two later I thought "I refuse to admit defeat" and I went back, started from scratch (read the books from the beginning again), and this time around I felt that I wasn't just running into a wall all the time -- I felt that most of the time was spent actually learning Rust.
And speaking of Rust insights: For the longest of time I kept thinking "Why doesn't this work?! Rust should be able to figure it out!". Then I became more cautious, and I rarely ran into lifetime issues. But the past few weeks I've had a new interesting experience with Rust: I've tried to do things that I assumed wouldn't work -- but they did. It's nice to have ventured into the land of "Why does this work?!".
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