Ah, interesting. I went from garbage-collected languages where thinking about ownership might be useful for keeping complexity low and occasionally comes up when you manage lists of objects, but ultimately isn’t needed, to Rust where well-defined ownership is enforced by the language.

So, I wasn’t aware that ownership is even as concrete of a thing in other languages…

A local shop here only has shopping carts, no baskets. You can get smaller shopping carts, and in fact even shopping carts for toddlers to push around, but you still need a coin for those.

And yep, I’ve genuinely been stood in front of that shop and went back home, because I didn’t have an appropriate coin. I think, even twice already.
I could have bought a small item to have them hand me out coins and then done another loop with the shopping cart, but yeah, there was just no way, I’d waste that much time.

Interesting. Presumably, enough of their customers now show up without the appropriate coins, due to electronic payment methods being available otherwise, that they decided to not require coins.

Here in Germany, where we hold onto cash a bit more dearly due to our Stasi-past, I don’t know any shop where I can take a shopping cart without sticking a coin in…

Yeah, this is a rather US-specific meme…

KDE Discover and GNOME Software can install from FlatHub (or other Flatpak repos, if you add those).

Hmm, not sure, if I’ve heard of it. I’m guessing, we’re not talking about simply drawing a UML class diagram…? Is it for figuring out which object will have to clean up which other objects, in non-GCed languages?

The last one seems to be mostly like Brainfuck, just with different capitalizations of “moo”: https://esolangs.org/wiki/COW

Yeah, these become a lot less relevant with routine.

• Avoiding the main-thread panicking is mostly just a matter of not using .unwrap() and .expect().

• String vs. &str can mostly be solved by generally using owned datatypes (String) for storing in structs and using references (&str) for passing into function parameters. It does still happen that you forget the & at times, but that’s then trivial to solve (by just adding the &).

• “temporary value dropped while borrowed” can generally be avoided by not passing references outside of your scope/function. You want to pass the owned value outside. Clone, if you have to.

• “missing lifetime specifier” is also largely solved by not storing references in structs.

The thing with OOP, particularly how it’s used in GCed languages, is that it’s all about handing references out to wherever and then dealing with the complexity of not knowing who has access to your fields via getters & setters, or by cloning memory whenever it’s modified in asynchronous code.

Rust has quite the opposite mindset. It’s all about tracking where references go. It pushes your code to be very tree-shaped, i.e. references typically¹ only exist between a function and the functions it calls underneath. This is what allows asynchronous code to be safe in Rust, and I would also argue that the tree shape makes code easier to understand, too.

But yeah, some of the patterns you might know from OOP will not work in Rust for that reason. You will likely need to get into a different mindset over time.

Also just in case: We are talking OOP in the sense of the paradigm, i.e. object-oriented.
Just using objects, i.e. data with associated functions/methods, that works completely normal in Rust.

¹) If you genuinely need references that reach outside the tree shape, which is mostly going to be the case, if you work with multiple threads, then you can do so by wrapping your data structures in Arc<Mutex<_>> or similar. But yeah, when learning, you should try to solve your problems without these. Most programs don’t need them.

Yeah, we onboarded some folks into a Rust project last year and a few months in, they were genuinely surprised when I told them that unwrapping is pretty bad. Granted, they probably did read about it at some point and just forgot, but that isn’t helped by lots of code using .unwrap() either.

Can still use .is_positive(), though…

Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say “dotfiles”, I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don’t have to deal with the dotfiles myself.

I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
For example, I love KDE, but they really don’t do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I’ll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.

But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn’t happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it’s just not for non-technical Linux users.

After seeing how excited some folks got during COVID, that’s genuinely somewhat of a worry for me. Kind of like how lonely, young men can be sold on the idea of war, because they think they’ll finally be adored as a hero, you can just as well find preppers who think they’ll finally be adored, because they bought toilet paper before everyone else could.

In the case of COVID, it was thankfully a disappointment for the preppers, in that the best survival strategy was staying in your cushty home. That will be the case for the vast majority of infectious diseases. But I still bet someone out there had the intrusive thought that maybe they shouldn’t help reduce the spread of COVID, because you won’t be deemed a hero without a real crisis…

It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃

On KDE, I’d recommend getting a KWin Script for tiling. Krohnkite is what people use currently.

It’s not as buttery smooth as dedicated tiling window managers and it can be a bit glitchy at times, but it is better than one might expect and significantly easier (and likely less glitchy) than trying to get bspwm to work in Plasma.

It’s the same thing as ternary, just without the ? : syntax.

For those who don’t get it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationery

In the case of Rust, you can also omit the type annotation in the vast majority of cases and the compiler will infer it.