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Do I go with ol’ reliable and risk being outdated in a few years, or go with the new language and risk being too niche and unpopular?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