Yaakov Shore rambles on about life, tech, coding and banjo licks.
The docs on Rust are very good and the have a script that installs Rust and Cargo and everything you need to get going. The script is available at Rustup and the documentation is at the rust-lang website. My reason for writing this is to have a quick reference for the basic concepts - but most of my knowledge is from The Rust Book.
Despite my New Year’s “resolution” to learn .NET. I found I enjoyed F# but found C# to be a thoroughly ‘meh’ version of the most ‘meh’ language ever (i.e. Java). Frankly, I found C# to be what Java would be if it really had strong opinions about the OS it was running on - but was kinda in denial about it. However, I found Rust to be loads of fun! Basically, Rust is a relatively “low level” or “sytem’s programming” language with a cool “python like” modern syntax. Also, the Cargo crates system is awesome! The whole C# NuGet thing, I imagine probably works well on Windows - on Linux, this was not a smooth experience. I’ve heard Rust contrasting with Go often (they were both started around the same time), people claim that Rust has more of a learning curve. I disagree. If you’re familiar with Python or JavaScript - languages with generics that support a declaritive, concise coding style - the imperitive and verbose style that Go gives you can be a bit off-putting. Don’t get me wrong, I like Go a lot - but the fact that you can learn the syntax in a few hours is often overshadowed by the fact that whenever you do anything, you kinda have to write some for _, val := range someCollection { // do something with val here. } loops and do a bunch of err, val := bla bla; if !err..... Compared to this, I find it’s relatively easy to hit the ground running with Rust, and the “new” ownership paradigm that Rust comes with is actually quite intuitive once you get the idea.
My job recently sponsored my taking a Nanodegree course at Udacity for data engineering. So far, the projects seem to be done mostly by interacting with various databases (currently PostgreSQL and Cassandra) through python in Jupyter Notebooks set up on their platform. The format they set up the exercises is really rather repetitive an tedious. Each insert is the same thing, many times. I wonder if this is a common pattern among data people, or just an attempt to get you used to writing the SQL. (Although, SQL knowledge and python was a supposedly prerequisite for the course, so this is a bit confusing.)
One of my goes for 2021 is to learn C# and F# (I mostly work in Python and JavaScript). More details about New Years resolutions here.