this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
30 points (100.0% liked)

Programming

17672 readers
54 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Folks, I need a hobby. I'm a C programmer who has lost his passion for programming, it seems. I've decided to try to spark my passion again by going back to the basics, perhaps by creating a programming tutorial Wikibook, for modern applications.

The trouble is, I cannot decide if I should make C or Rust my programming language of choice.

I use C all the time, and have barely any experience in Rust.

Do I go with ol' reliable and risk being outdated in a few years, or go with the new language and risk being too niche and unpopular?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] solrize@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago

Writing a book when you don't know the subject matter doesn't sound likely to result in a good book. Even more so for a language like Rust, which (short of Haskell) is the closest thing to a mainstream language that is informed by a lot of pointy headed PL (programming language) theory. A book about programming in Rust doesn't have to go into the theory per se, but the author should be familiar with it, just like someone who writes an introductory calculus or statistics text really needs a much deeper mathematical background than the book itself will convey.

If you want a Rust-related hobby, first of all, why not do Advent of Code in Rust, or otherwise make a study of Rust? And then if you're interested in PL theory, that's another area to study. Harper's book PFPL is a good place to start: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl/