Over the past few weeks, I started learning Rust because my livestream audience challenged me to know about it and make an app.

Within an hour, I had a working command line app, which was not bad for a total newbie to Rust. OK, I think the past 30 years of programming other languages probably helped more than a little.

But what has me thinking this is something I'd like to spend more time learning and writing apps with is how it made me think in new and old ways.

For example, there is no garbage collection, and variables are immutable by default, and this new thing ownership that I don't truly understand or appreciate yet.

My point here is a simple one. By learning something new just for fun, I'm relearning and discovering ways to think differently about all the programming I do.

This proves the view that learning techniques are better than learning syntax. One, we can take from language to language, and the other ties us to how we think.