Rust in 2 Days

Learning a new language! This was a big challenge to do in 2 days, but I managed to learn the majority of general-purpose Rust syntax in the first 10 hours and more advanced concepts like parallelism within the next day. It greatly helps to look at programming languages as a set of syntax rules that achieve a certain task.

Let's consider all of the Rust syntax as a mathematical set $R$, the C syntax as $C$and Python as $P$. Once you realise how big the set $R \cap C \cap P$ is, you realise that learning all the concepts in $C$ means you already know a lot of concepts from $R$ (apart from syntactical nuances obviously, this you just learn by writing more code).

Hence learning a new language isn’t like re-learning a whole new syntax and alphabet, it's about knowing how to extend your previous knowledge with new and more advanced concepts.

Moreover, I would say this has an overall net positive effect on the rate of learning. The more we learn the larger our body of knowledge becomes and the larger it gets the faster we can learn new topics from related domains. This is why you might meet an engineer who is above average at one thing, say designing brake systems, and then another engineer who knows how to not only build an entire car, but a rocket too. They’ve leveraged the fundamental knowledge learnt from previous domains to speed up their knowledge acquisition of new domains.

It’s always easier to learn something new if we can link it to something we already know. For example, understanding pointers and ownership in Rust (which can be considered a quite advanced topic) is much easier when you draw parallels to pointers in C (something every student of this course will no doubt have learnt before). So yeah everyone can do it.