Wolf howl, by Lorc, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I signed up for the latest cohort of David Beazley’s, Ruckus.
The basic idea, behind Ruckus is to write a small interpreter in Rust!
Why?
From the Ruckus page:
This course tackles Rust by stepping back and thinking about it from the standpoint of a “programming languages” project. If Rust is really so different, how would you go about finding out how? Suffice to say, building a programming language will cut right to the heart of the matter.
This is exactly how I learned Python. Only it took me an inordinately long time. And I didn’t even realise that I was doing it that way. While most of my friends were happy just using Python, I could not quite do it right, because I had no fundamentals1, and since my background has been tech support, hardware and people management, I needed to unlearn a ton of stuff.
I’m cautiously hoping Ruckus will help me do the same with Rust, only in a turbo charged manner.
Rust fascinates me. And I quite like my journey to its doorstep.
I learned writing for myself with Python. But when it came time to sharing my tiny projects with friends and family, I was a bit stumped.
I learned Go, just so I could give them a binary and then instruct them with a “just run this.”
And while that solved my distribution problem, Go’s type system made me realise, just how well suited a typed language is for collaboration.
Which brings me to Rust. Long term, this is the language2, I would love to write for performant code, because Rust’s big picture features (safe, performant, easy to distribute) are exactly what I want for all my tiny bits and bobs.
Which in turn brings me back to Ruckus.
Getting a teensy peek at how everything works underneath, while at the same time, getting a firm handle on the language seems like a fun challenge.
I also wanted to try what Cal Newport, calls a grand gesture in Deep Work:
The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
[…] The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.
Make no mistake, my current state is that of an enthusiastic, ignorant newbie. How hard can it be? I’m woefully unprepared for what might come. The only thing I know, is that I don’t know. I fully expect to be like the wolf above, losing my mind, howling at the moon and generally creating a ruckus.
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