Remember Rust with Anki

Spam.

On one hand, I understand how beneficial is to learn a new programming language. On the other hand, having to constantly beaten by mixing up simple language syntax, googling how to find an element in an array, or even create an Anki deck to revise from time to time is so funny to me.

The one thing that actually helped me to jump between languages and platforms is Haxe. Just use the same syntax and API for the basic stuff, and put the focus on actually building the program. I still have to understand and know well about the target (be it C++, JS, or Python), but the time and the mental effort saved from googling about basic syntax and standard APIs is massive.

I think of (many branches of) knowledge as being like a web built on top of stakes stuck in the ground. Anki is really good at helping you stick those stakes in the ground, but it's still on you to build that web.

You can go either way; you can take a sort of vague, weak web you've already started building and use the stakes to fortify it. You can lay out a lot of stakes to help you build the web later. You can do any hybrid thing you want.

But either way, Anki may help you memorize things, but it doesn't really help you learn things. I think it's important to understand that when using Anki, so you don't accidentally convince yourself you're "learning" when you aren't. But it can greatly accelerate the learning, to the point that the memorization+learning time (For human language learning, a common Anki task, I suggest an "all of the above" approach; some pre-made cards that probably are higher quality than what you can assemble yourself, some cards you make yourself based on your own learning and reading material, some raw vocabulary cards that doesn't much matter where they come from, non-Anki sources like textbooks, a little bit of everything. In most endeavors in life that's a recipe for diffusion of effort and a lot of wasted effort but it seems to me to be the way to go for human language. A single type of Anki card on its own may let you lay down a truly glorious set of stakes, but you still won't have "learned" much of anything.)

This would depend on when you spend your review times. I do mine 2-3 times a day: morning with my coffee, around lunch, evening after dinner. Times that are otherwise mostly "idle" (if I'm doing anything else, it's browsing, reading a book, or watching a show). I do sometimes put together cards during the workday (I need to get back into this habit) after looking up something I don't know or couldn't recall but thought was worth committing to memory.

In the end, trying to remember everything would be silly and largely a waste. But memorizing those things that are common (but not daily) pain points would probably be an improvement over not. OTOH, I'm not going to quantify my time sufficiently to be able to provide clear evidence that it really speeds up my work.

I've been writing almost exclusively rust in my day job at ThreatX for about 3 years now. It's getting picked up more and more in production everyday. It's a great, modern, maintainable, secure alternative to C/C++. I couldn't imagine doing another greenfield project in C again.