rustlings

I finished rustlings this morning, more out of a desire to evaluate it as a pedagogical tool than to learn rust, although learning a bit of rust doesn't seem like a bad idea anyway.

Some reflections:

• Most of the exercises are very simple - change a return type, add a &mut, clone instead of borrow
  • A lot of them reflect the thick complexity of rust - rust code is full of .into, .from, &mut, and similar constructs that can seem incomprehensible to an outsider
  • It's a really nice feature of rustlings that it makes you a bit more comfortable manipulating these features, and a bit of confidence that you might have a hope of figuring it out if you were to build something yourself
  • That said, I don't think rustlings really prepares you to write code on your own. It does all the structuring of the code for you, so you never have to learn how to write your own functions, structs, etc, etc
    • (I think that's fine - it's still a useful tool - just noting it)
• It feels like an opportunity is lost that there's no step that presents you with an excellent answer after you finish an exercise
  • I had to go look up a random answer set on github on my own to compare my answers to something else. I often learned something when I did so!
  • But I'm not sure at all of the quality of the answers I was reading; it would be nice if there were a set of Certified Answers™
• It probably took me about 6 hours, in snatches here and there; it's a pretty short time investment. I think that's a good length.

Overally, I really enjoyed it! A simple and satisfying way to get up to speed (a bit) in a foreign language.

my answers are here, in case that's interesting to anybody.