So after writing this to learn Rust, what are your thoughts on Rust? What do you especially like and dislike about it, or what were you surprised about?
I appreciate the ecosystem of packages that seem really well maintained. I don’t love the syntax and find Rust harder to read and learn so far compared to something like golang (I’m used to R which is not a compiled language but has a great dev community).
I do love the compiler and support tools built into Cargo (fmt, clippy, etc.).
That's been similar to my experience. The ecosystem is extremely polished and smooth, the build tools and package manager and IDE support, all of it. Especially compared to C++ which I cuold barely get working here.
> I often feel there's still an imbalance. I feel like I owe something more
Debt is related to value, which is inherently subjective. In nature, nothing reproducable is one yard long, so we create something and call it a yard, and that first thing becomes the standard. The same is true economically; there's no way to measure what one loaf of bread is inherently worth. Even the time and resources needed to produce it vary depending on countless circumstances. A man with a bread factory will have a much easier time producing one loaf than a homeless man.
The same is true for pain. What's as trivial as a small papercut to one person may be overwhelmingly traumatic to another person, and another can handle losing a limb as easily as losing a pen. Countless variable psychological circumstances prevent us from making any true measurement of debt.
But justice requires that we try our best and move on. So we create economies out of barter and then gold and then bills and then credit. Or we create justice systems that are constantly flowing and changing in their understanding of right and wrong, and also value and loss.
It may be that some people who helped you had no difficulty. I do remember a teacher telling us once to be careful of what we say, because we never know which things we say will stick with someone forever with deep profoundness. Which goes to show that a small off the cuff comment has the very real potential to contribute toward making someone's life significantly better or significantly worse, yet the comment took almost no thought or effort. It cost little.
There's a moment in a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s, where Adam Chmielowski asks Madame Helena what it costs her to play Ophelia or Lady MacBeth. She replies, "in a way, it costs me all my life. It is a strange ransom; every time I pay it all over again."
I have met many people who are convinced that they have been wronged so grievously that the offender must pay every last penny they have or ever will make, and suffer every second of this life as much as possible, and they hope Hell exists purely so that the offender's suffering may not be relieved by the most torturous death imaginable. Such a person will never be satisfied or happy.
For the little it's worth, my recommendation is to repay people with what good value you justly and reasonably estimate that you owe them for the good they have done to you, and be done with it. If they consider it too much or too little, accomodate them a little, but only within reason. Inversely, if anyone has wronged you, consider their debt paid to you already, since this costs you nothing, whereas exacting justice is tiresome and restless. Besides, forgiving someone's debt to you gives them encouragement to improve, whereas exacting it discourages them and puts them on the defense. That's not to say you shouldn't insist that society as a whole have justice also, for example by calling the police when a legitimate crime has occurred to you or someone else. I'm only talking about the debt in context of two humans.
Traditional dynamic web servers can solve a lot of the same problems that SPAs and event front-end frameworks like React solve, by just applying software engineering principles to the whole stack. That's what Novo Cantico[1] does, and a lot of what I've been trying to say in my blog posts[2] that explain Novo Cantico.
It's difficult to describe Novo Cantico, because it's mostly just using new software engineering techniques combined with ordinary JavaScript functions to build a dynamic website. I hoped this blog post did a better job than the previous ones.
The first half of this article explains some physiological reasons behind something I've noticed often: the more someone feels defensive and defenseless, the more arrogant they become, and the more hardened they become in their thoughts and opinions, no matter how wrong. So that if someone is worked up enough and feeling cornered emotionally, they will die on the hill that grass is not green if need be. This is why it's especially important for parents and spouses to be kind, calm, rational, patient, and loving at all times.
The second half has valuable advice for more than just spouses, although it's mostly talking about divorce. But also employee/employer relationships, friendships, and any other type: if you are not actually trying to make sure you fully understand the other person's position, you are working against unity with them.
But I have to disagree with the article's final word of advice:
> Spend less effort trying to control your partner's thinking and more trying to understand and appreciate differences in your perspectives.
Not that this is wrong, but that there's another step after it which must carefully be practiced: when you know for sure that you're right, and that the other person is objectively wrong in this situation, it's important to stand firm on what you must do, and not waver. All without losing kindness, compassion, patience, an attentive ear and everything else the article mentions.
St. Edith Stein once said something like without truth, there is no charity, and without charity, there is no truth. I see time and time again people make this very simple mistake: forfeit truth in order to preserve charity. But the two are not incompatible and never can be.
A person will say, "well in order to be accepting to this person, I must be willing to accept that maybe they are correct and I am incorrect," and they will stray from their objective certainty. That's why I'm not a fan of the quote in this article, "Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one." It either states or strongly implies that there is no objective truth, depending on the author's meaning. But there is objective truth, truth that is true no matter if nobody is alive to perceive it or not.
And when we stray from that truth, we abandon our only hope of helping people out of their own self-deceit and delusions. I have seen many people join in the delusions of others in order to comfort them or calm them down or give them hope in a false reality. This is not truly charitable behavior.
True charity, true selfless and sacrificial love for another, always wants to help them out of their self-destruction, which always comes from self-deceit. And this requires that we remain in the truth. A tree cannot help birds of the air if it uproots itself and tries to follow them, it needs to stand firmly planted.
> This is why it's especially important for parents and spouses to be kind, calm, rational, patient, and loving at all times.
Both spouses and parents are human and being like that all the time is not possible.
Dealing with someone you just described, arrogant and defensive focused on being right is highly stressful and tiring. Loved one being constantly arrogant to you lowers you self esteem and your self perception too. At some point, ressentment over conceding yet another hill while being nice and calm while getting arrogance thrown at you boils over.
Or it all turns onto one sided abusive relationship if you fail to set boundaries. You can't have one sided good relationship.
And yet, when you're "right" you can be very wrong. E.g. during a heated discussion, you really feel truly charitable, selfless and sacrificial and want to help the other party out of their self-destruction/unveil the self-deceit. You're truly rooted in absolute truth and righteousness. You're doing an excellent job inside until.. you screw up royally on the execution or picked a wrong choice of medium/channel e.g. WhatsApp to express your intentions or to render assistance. It can even be your choice of words or things beyond your control. And then it's all downhill from there. No amount of right intentions saves anyone except when it's coupled with near perfect execution.
How then do we execute our intentions (truly charitable) ones to bring about the maximum efficacy? Experience.
Sometimes, you need to take a step back to take 4 steps forward. Sometimes you need to be wrong to be right. It's like fishing/kite-flying, sometimes you need to lax sometimes you need to roll it in.
I would like to believe that people can change over time.