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Welcome to my first post on (kinda) rust. I am not a proper rustacean yet. I lose most of my fights with the compiler, and the borrow checker is more magical and arcane than not, but ‘Boy howdy!’, how do I like my time with rust!

The highest praise I could parcel out, in any regard, is “It makes me happy!”, and I can see how rust is taking me to that place quickly.

Rust is a many splendored thing: bytey like C, my first real love, but elegant instead of slightly awkward and fortrany. A real mensh with proper types. Skookum in suprising ways: inside a microcontroller, as a vehicle for scratching that toy OS itch.

It welcomes you back into the realm of sockets, byte arrays, and threads… but offers maps, and channels, and package management.

It now beckons me to know it, to try a project just to see how it goes, how it helps. Does it enchant me to make web apps? (no, little does). Does it take me to old graphics happy place? Heck yesss. P2P with Iroh, exploring games with Bevy, database games with Datafusion… check, check, and check.

Back to the beginning⌗

In the beginning of this me that you see, there was a boy and a 64k address space. We clocked the world at 1Mhz. Data came in pressure waves. My ZX Spectrum came with a honking manual for BASIC (not my first love, but my first crush, without which you cannot learn about love). It was in English, which was not my native Spanish, but I knew some BASIC, which means I could figure out some English words. My dad was sometimes there, translating a paragraph while tracing the text with his finger, glasses off to be able to read the text. I listened and later would parse through the English while remember the Spanish.

If anything, I just typed the programs from the manual, poked at them to see what happened when I ran them. Some mystified me, some I got. It was the worst way of learning how to program a computer, but it was the best thing in the world. Once I got bored with a program, I’d try the next.

Then it happened. There was a program that said something about a “dragon”. It was big, took forever to type, and it had a lot of things I did not understand. “COS(X)” I remember. Lots of math.

Then I ran it.

A drawing began to appear on the TV. Painstakingly. Slowowoly. It was pure magic. I was witnessing an arcane, hidden power unfold in front of me. I was sold. For life.

The shape in front of me was indescribable, the unnatural congress of a porcupine with the letter S, but its spikes themselves shaped like the very tips of the letter. Like a spider with a thousand spiderlets on its back, but regular, and elegant.

I saw a lot of crazy shapes on my TV that year: the characters of the I-Ching. The cosine curve, for the first time. All are etched in my memory, but that math dragon… was burnt into my retina.

I came to rediscover (or revisit) it many times later. In a Scientific American issue, courtesy of Martin Gardner. Inside of FractInt. (Maybe?) In James Gleick’s Chaos… and every time it would reveal something new. It introduced me to its cousins: Sierpinksi, Koch, the Cantor set. It showed me how it was an iterative construct, replacing lines in patterns with patterns. It mentioned that it was described by some formula with arrows. I did not understand it, and the more I learnt from it the less I understood what the original program did, why it worked.

I moved on, so I learnt math (vectors were my first love there), I ran into the Logo Turtle.

I set off on a quest to learn Computer Science, and while there I was taught recursion. I recognized the dragons arrow formulas in the description of grammars.

And then I understood: years, decades later. All the bricks on that road had been laid. There were no gaps, no mysteries. I had forgotten all the details of the program, but I remember its essence, and I now understood it totally.

I guess I lied to you. I promise we’ll look at some rust code next time.