Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rust Guide

doc.rust-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 147 posts

Re: Rust Guide

#71

Post by coldtea »

axaxs wrote: post #2

Honest initial impressions from my quick glance. This guide is confused. It reads at times like an informal conversation... lots of exclamations. That's pedantic, the real confusion comes from the target audience. As a programmer, I want as little cruft as possible. Get me to examples and how this differentiates from C. As a non programmer, teach me the basics of types and logic. From that thought, it's failing at bo…

Programmer of 15+ years here, I disagree.

It's a new language with some interestinf semantics than can be tricky even for those familiar with say C or Java or Python etc, so it's good that it's conversational -- it helps cater to both the new programmer and the experienced one in other languages.

The skipping of cruft part I can do by myself, using "vgrep".

This "skipping of cruft" because we're talking to "experienced programmers" is what makes Manfiles nearly useless, EVEN for experienced programmers, unless as a very basic flag reference.

Re: Rust Guide

#72

Post by bsdshepherd »

steveklabnik wrote: post #66

Hi everyone! I just woke up to find all this, and I'm speaking at a conference today where there's no laptops allowed, so we'll see when I get to read these comments. A few things: 1. Consider this a 'first draft.' I wrote this in sections, see [1], and now it's time to edit as a whole. 2. Because of that, there are still changes coming. There's even an active one in the queue right now. [2] 3. This guide is fairly l…

> Feedback very welcome.

Negative feedback is being pruned and buried.

Re: Rust Guide

#74

Post by ldng »

fleetfox wrote: post #23
eik3_de wrote: post #16

leaving aside the first-mover advantages like community, docs, stdlibs, api stability, where do you see rust's advantages over go?

Control, lack of garbage collector.

Control, yes.

Lack of garbage collector ? There is a garbage collector in the standard library : http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/gc/

It gives you even more control I would say as you can choose when/if to use a garbage collector. Which is not always a bad idea (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263811)

Re: Rust Guide

#75

Post by kyllo »

bcj wrote: post #42
easytiger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fn & mod are fine. no worse than cdr & car. Variable declaration and type annotations in rust are the thing you should be confused/angry/sad about.

I would say fn and mod are a lot better than cdr and car. At least fn and mod are just abbreviations of the words they represent. cdr and car requires me to know 60-year-old implementation details of Lisp.

This is why I like 'head'/'hd' and 'tail'/'tl' from ML/Haskell family more than Lisp/Scheme family's car/cdr.

Re: Rust Guide

#76

Post by maxerickson »

mkishi wrote: post #5
axaxs wrote: post #2

Honest initial impressions from my quick glance. This guide is confused. It reads at times like an informal conversation... lots of exclamations. That's pedantic, the real confusion comes from the target audience. As a programmer, I want as little cruft as possible. Get me to examples and how this differentiates from C. As a non programmer, teach me the basics of types and logic. From that thought, it's failing at bo…

I've always enjoyed informal guides, but oddly enough I share your frustration. Heck, I loved "Learn You a Haskell," yet this one reads very patronizing for some reason, and I can't figure out why.

I usually get that visceral reaction from pronoun heavy instructional material. I haven't decided if it is just a personal hang up or not.

It's usually possible to omit pronouns and end up shorter, maybe at the cost of ending up a little dryer:

"Welcome to the Rust guide. This is the place to learn how to program in Rust. Rust is a systems programming language with a focus on "high-level, bare-metal programming": low level control, but with zero-cost, higher level abstractions. We really think Rust is something special, and we hope you do too.

The guide starts with a traditional "Hello, World!" program. Next a quick detour to introduce "Cargo", a tool for managing and building Rust programs and libraries. Then it's back to the language."

If the guide actually builds something, the last sentence there could say "Then it's back to the language, starting with the basics and working up to ."

Re: Rust Guide

#77

Post by blt »

georgemcbay wrote: post #41
gosub wrote: post #9

let x = 5i; so, integers are written like complex numbers?

AFAICT they only need to be written like that if you want to assign them to an implicitly typed variable or you can use the alternate explicitly-typed form (which the guide also shows): let x: int = 5; As far as i being an unfortunate suffix, I can't think of a better one when you consider there is already a pattern to such suffixes (being the first letter of the type) carried over from C/C++, et al. I suspect mathem…

5s for 5 signed?

Re: Rust Guide

#78

Post by lelf »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #15

One stylistic nitpick / question. It says: > "We expected an integer, but we got (). () is pronounced 'unit', and is a special type in Rust's type system. () is different than null in other languages, because () is distinct from other types" Would it not be more accurate and more informative to compare the "special type" unit to "void" than to compare it to "null" ? The keyword "void" is a placeholder that says "noth…

It's called unit in math / many other languages.

null is not a type. void type is inhabited. unit type has exactly one value, ().

Re: Rust Guide

#79

Post by scott_s »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #6
axaxs wrote: post #2

Honest initial impressions from my quick glance. This guide is confused. It reads at times like an informal conversation... lots of exclamations. That's pedantic, the real confusion comes from the target audience. As a programmer, I want as little cruft as possible. Get me to examples and how this differentiates from C. As a non programmer, teach me the basics of types and logic. From that thought, it's failing at bo…

This seems to be fundamental problem with programming texts. I was reading a couple of javascript books recently (eloquent javascript and javascript allonge) and I was struck by the sheer amount of background knowledge you needed to have. Most of that I've picked up over the last 20 years, but not all of it (or else I wouldn't be reading the books) so I constantly felt like I was having something I knew explained to…

Mark Pilgrim solved this problem quite well in "Dive Into Python". He presented the working code first, at the beginning of each chapter ("diving in"). If you could read and fully understand the code, then you had no need to read the rest of the chapter. If there were only small things you didn't understand, you could skim to those sections.

This philosophy is stated pretty clearly in the beginning of the book:

You know how other books go on and on about programming fundamentals and finally work up to building a complete, working program? Let's skip all that.

2.1. Diving in

Here is a complete, working Python program.

It probably makes absolutely no sense to you. Don't worry about that, because you're going to dissect it line by line. But read through it first and see what, if anything, you can make of it.

See: http://www.diveintopython.net/getting_to_know_python/index.h...

Re: Rust Guide

#80

Post by makmanalp »

axaxs wrote: post #2

Honest initial impressions from my quick glance. This guide is confused. It reads at times like an informal conversation... lots of exclamations. That's pedantic, the real confusion comes from the target audience. As a programmer, I want as little cruft as possible. Get me to examples and how this differentiates from C. As a non programmer, teach me the basics of types and logic. From that thought, it's failing at bo…

I think the problem is that references and tutorials fill different niches. This is a tutorial, basically. Tutorials are conversational, intuitive, hand-holding walkthroughs. If you think you already know enough, you should be able to just skim the reference. References are to the point, don't hand-hold, and get the job done.
Post reply on HN