Add a blog post about rusty rust

_posts/2019-12-01-rust-breakthrough.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Finally understanding Rust"
+tags:
+- programming
+- rust
+---
+
+This year I have been struggling to learn [Rust](https://rust-lang.org), but I am now pleased
+to share that I'm _finally_ understanding the language. [Earlier](/2019/04/02/struggling-with-rust.html) I lamented the challenges of
+adopting Rust. Between semantically important apostrophes and
+angle-brackets a plenty, I was struggling to read and write basic Rust.
+I can easily read Ada, C, Python, JavaScript, Java, and Ruby. Something about
+the syntax of Rust remained difficult to process. The code looked jarring and
+dissonant, I could read snippets but translating entire functions or modules
+into a workable mental model was not feasible. Over the past month however, I
+believe I have made some progress up the learning curve. I can now write
+some Rust!
+
+Getting over the hump required more effort than I had hoped, but after some small practice exercises I had the confidence and skills to move on to less trivial Rust.
+I am not one for solving [Project
+Euler](https://projecteuler.net/) problems but instead I focused on porting
+little utilities which I regularly use in my local environment. The
+main educational benefit of these utilities is that none of them required network I/O, which is
+what always really interests me about writing software. Instead these utilities
+have very fixed inputs and outputs.  A small well-understood problem domain
+made it **much** easier for me to clear my head and focus on the reading and
+writing of Rust.
+
+I also purchased a paper copy of the [Rust Programming Language
+book](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/). I'm not one for reading programming books
+cover-to-cover, but having a paper copy still turned out to be useful. Taking the
+paper copy to another location, _away from the computer_, allowed me to focus
+on a few key chapters which addressed key areas of my confusion. The book is
+written quite well, plenty of strong narrative explaining concepts behind Rust
+rather than solely focusing on code snippets and the explanation that surrounds
+them. Among other things, the narrative helped me wrap my brain around the zen
+and art of ownership, a key concept to Rust if you're to build anything
+consequential with it.
+
+Finally, I have started to read _more_ Rust, which also helped me up the
+learning curve. The convention of an `examples/` directory in
+[Crates](https://crates.io) has proven itself invaluable. Example snippets for
+crates which do interesting things, or interface with systems that I am also
+interested in working with, gave me a better feel of the syntax, structure, and
+overall aesthetic of Rust.
+
+I still struggle with the myriad of built-in modules in the standard library,
+but I know that to be unavoidable from my time in the Java ecosystem. As one
+writes more and more, slowly but surely the standard library seeps into the
+muscle memory as if through osmosis. It just takes time.
+
+Perhaps the learning curve would not have felt so steep if I had been able to
+dedicate a week or two to the exercise of learning a new and structurally
+different systems programming language. Once upon a time I could have
+dedicated that much effort to such a hobby but those days are long gone now.
+Instead I find myself picking up an hour here, thirty minutes there, and trying
+to load mental context fast enough to make some progress with learning a new
+skill. That approach might work for simple things, but Rust definitely was not
+that to me.
+
+If you are an experienced developer learning any new language of sufficient
+newness, I would encourage you to think about how you learned to program in the
+first place. Simple, small, almost embarrassingly basic exercises. The complex
+systems you are capable of modeling will have to wait, you may have to go back
+to the beginning. Back to the third, fourth, and fifth exercises after your
+"Hello World." It is painful, but this time around it will go much faster
+than the first.