Climbing the mountain: or, venturing into PL theory

Summary

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about what actually interests me when it comes to programming. I got into computers tinkering with Linux and Python scripting, before moving into web development, and now as a freelance technical writer. I’ve always enjoyed learning about (and writing about) complex topics. And as this year kicked off, I decided to ask myself: what truly got me interested in programming? In other words, what problems and what domain interests me the most? There’s a couple of things which have nerd-sniped me recently and I plan to focus on: Rust and programming languages in general. I thought I’d talk about why I’m learning these topics for myself, and also in case it helps anyone else trying to learn something CS-heavy. Why Rust? Why PL theory? The reason I chose Rust is because in my many (failed) attempts to learn it, I’ve found it to be a very interesting language. I’m not even just talking about the memory management semantics, but also its pattern matching, error-handling, data structures, and more. Rust is the first time I’ve really ever experienced learning programming concepts where I am like “wow, this seems to make so much sense to me”. Adjacent to that, I started to think more about how these kind of languages are implemented. How do you even go about creating programming languages like these? What is the compiler actually doing? How is my IDE giving me these diagnostics and syntax errors? Building small developer tools has always been a fascination of mine, but I’ve never really explored the more complex areas of the tools we use on a day-to-day basis. Deciding to explore these topics is also quite a daunting task. Although I am competent at high-level programming and explaining technical subjects, PL theory, compilers, Rust… it is quite heavy stuff for the mere oat-latte sipping, MacBook-using, soydev that I am. Slaying the dragon, climbing the mountain 🚵 The biggest thing about this switch is that I got into progrmaming and work self-t...