In case this helps, I recently noticed that the sigils correspond to
possessive pronouns:
'~' => "my",
'&' => "their",
'@' => "our"
Of course, `@` might be going away, but `Rc<>`, `Gc<>`, and so forth all
(will) have the same intuitive content, only different representations
(among other properties). Similarly `~Foo` and plain `Foo` both mean "my",
while having differences in other areas, in which case yeah, telling you
that `Foo` is stored in-place while `~Foo` is stored on the heap doesn't
help you if you don't know what heap allocation is about. But maybe this is
something.
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Jordi Boggiano <j.boggi...@seld.be> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 5:17 AM, Patrick Walton <pcwal...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
> > I've observed a lot of beginning Rust programmers treat the language as
> "add
> > sigils until it works". (I have specific examples but don't want to name
> > people here; however, feel free to contact me privately if you're
> curious.)
>
> I feel like I have to out myself as one of the idiot newcomers that do
> this, just for the sake of the discussion. I have no systems language
> background and frankly never had to consider the difference between
> the heap or the stack in the past 10-some years of writing code.
>
> I don't really think having new vs ~ would help me avoid this problem.
> The issue I believe is that the language looks understandable enough
> for the average joe used to higher level web languages (php, python,
> ruby). That's a great thing of course, that I can just jump in and
> mostly grasp what's going on, while past attempts at C++ tinkering
> quickly ended in tears. It also means that you have lots of people
> that come in and are capable of getting stuff to compile but won't
> necessarily understand the small print. Often there is an alternative
> to pooping sigils all over the code, but if you don't understand the
> concepts behind it it's hard to reason about what those alternatives
> could be.
>
> I think I'm getting better with this over time, and the rust libraries
> also get more usable and consistent leading to less ~ insanity, but
> one thing that would have helped early on is a good warning in the
> docs about this, and a good explanation of what the hell is going on
> (not one geared towards C++ devs using lingo that only low level devs
> are familiar with).
>
> I realize it's no easy task, and that arguably I should probably just
> read a book, but at the same time it's an amazing feat I think that
> the language is so accessible while remaining at such a low level, so
> if we manage to improve the onboarding process it would probably be
> very beneficial. There are tons of web devs that are interested in
> doing things faster/lower level - if only for fun. Maybe it's worth
> having a chapter for them in the docs. I'd happily help review that
> and point out unclear things :)
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Jordi Boggiano
> @seldaek - http://nelm.io/jordi
> _______________________________________________
> Rust-dev mailing list
> Rust-dev@mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
>
--
Your ship was destroyed in a monadic eruption.
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