Programming in English

[00:00:00]I'm Matt Godbolt and I'm Ben Rady and this is Two's Complement, a programming podcast.

[00:00:06]>> [music] >> Hey Ben.

[00:00:19]>> Hey Matt.

[00:00:20]>> How are things?

[00:00:22]>> Great.

[00:00:22]>> It's that time of the week when I say hey Ben and then you say hey Matt and then we talk about something.

[00:00:29]>> Yep.

[00:00:29]>> Have you just any idea what what that thing should be because you know, I planned carefully and I have nothing.

[00:00:36]>> Right.

[00:00:38]No, I do I have a I have a thing. I swear >> Okay, let's talk about your All right, what we going to talk about?

[00:00:42]>> Um so uh careful listener of this podcast may recall that I have talked before about having a period in my career where I tried to learn a new programming language every year.

[00:00:58]>> Mhm.

[00:00:58]>> Um this year's new programming language is English. It's all the rage. Um but in addition to that uh >> American or English?

[00:01:09]>> English. It's English.

[00:01:12]>> Oh, okay.

[00:01:13]>> I mean you got to put some U's in some places I guess if you really want to speak English.

[00:01:18]>> and I and far fewer Z's than you would put in and you would call them Z's.

[00:01:21]>> Right. Some S's instead of Z's. That's what it is. But that's um is this like the German translation is where you just take all the spaces out?

[00:01:29]>> I think that's pretty much what German is. German is just English but with capital random capital letters in the middle of the of the word and no spaces between words and what describe them. Yeah. Have we Is there anyone we haven't offended yet?

[00:01:41]Let's just uh >> [laughter] >> Okay, we're programming in English.

[00:01:47]Programming in English. So tell me tell me about your new language you're programming in which I mean >> Uh well, so I I I've kind of just I've had on my list and I say like jokingly that you know that I'm new programming language is English.

[00:02:00]Um the program I've had a number of programming languages on this list of like you know if I ever get back to this practice cuz I kind of fell out of it because I was sort of like what language could I learn that would allow me to do something that I can't do in an existing language, right? Like you know if you've never built a web application before and you don't know JavaScript then JavaScript is >> probably >> a right.

[00:02:23]>> Yeah, that's interesting.

[00:02:25]>> I couldn't do this before, right?

[00:02:26]>> Okay, or like a HDL for like you know hey I'm programming an FPGA and I can make lights blink in a new and exciting way but I can't write this in in in Java and so maybe I need to do learn something else and it's a paradigm shift that goes alongside the language it makes you think I mean I think what is it the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis thing that says you know like the language you first learned sort of tempers how every and my first language was you know machine code and assembly so that definitely has tempered my entire >> [clears throat] >> experience in my career but like there are definitely languages that force you to think in different ways.

[00:02:59]>> Yes.

[00:02:59]>> Be it like a Prology type language and first bends your mind and go oh I see you can specify things this way or a Lisp-y thing where then you're like exposed to the fact that the representation is the language and all that good stuff.

[00:03:13]So but yeah English though but I'm pretty familiar with English.

[00:03:17]>> Yeah yeah. Well okay so so the the the spoiler alert the language that I am trying to teach myself basically starting this week is Rust.

[00:03:26]And I have used Rust before.

[00:03:29]But the the and the sort of like new idea around all of this is in the way that I teach myself this language. So so previously the way that I had always done this was I came up with some project right and that was sort of the relationship between like hey I'm going to learn a new language to be able to do this kind of thing and I'm going to learn that by doing the thing and then I will you know learn the language and then I will be very confident that I can do the thing, right?

[00:03:54]>> Right. I want to write write tracer.

[00:03:55]I'll go write it in rust and I get my, you know, maybe you've done that 10 times before or it's something completely new like the Yeah, I get it.

[00:04:01]Yeah.

[00:04:02]>> And the, you know, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis reason for doing that is also a good reason. I've told people, you know, that people ask me for advice on, you know, what should I do in my career?

[00:04:11]How should I be a better programmer? And I would I still give this advice out.

[00:04:15]I'm like, how many programming languages do you know? You should try to learn more of them. Um, because of two things.

[00:04:21]One is you will be able to do more things and also it will expand your mind in terms of how things work. You know, I love uh, closure as a programming language cuz it's fun. I wouldn't inflict it on anyone right now other than sort of a, you know, maybe learning exercise. But it is a fantastic learning exercise. If you've never used a Lisp before, it's awesome.

[00:04:41]>> It's funny you mentioned that because when I first moved to this country, one of the first things I ended up doing was working with one of our mutual friends on a system that was all in closure. And like, I was completely mind Well, it it took me a while to get over the hump of what the heck is this? Why are we doing this? It seems like we're doing it on hard mode to Oh, no, this is pretty neat to the penny dropping and me going like, oh, I get this now. I see functional programming languages as being useful. I see Lisp-like languages. I see wow. And, you know, I have not chosen to go back to it, but I do feel like I am I'm enriched as a programmer by having had that experience.

[00:05:22]>> Yes. Yes. And it's an intersubjective experience to use one of our favorite podcast words because if you have used a Lisp before, then you can talk to someone else who has used a Lisp before and be like, this is just let over lambda and they'll know what you mean, right?

[00:05:36]Um, so, those are many reasons to learn programming languages and I highly recommend that people do. What I am doing this week is I am attempting to learn a programming language not by building something that is I think, you know, a representation of what would be good for that language. In fact, I am trying to learn a programming language by not writing any code at all.

[00:05:58]>> Oh.

[00:05:58]>> What I am trying to do is learn a programming language by asking Claude to teach me the language and quiz me on whether or not I know it.

[00:06:08]>> Oh.

[00:06:09]>> And I am just going back and forth like taking snippets of code being like, "What does this do? Okay, explain this. Explain that. Explain that. Okay, now quiz me on all of the concepts that you just taught me >> Wow.

[00:06:21]>> and see if I get it right. And then I ask follow-up questions, all of that."

[00:06:25]>> That's not what I thought you were going to say at all. I just figured you were going to say, "Yeah, I asked it to write the thing for me and I and I skimmed the code afterwards." And I was about to bring up all the kind of like the badnesses of like, um, you know, the quote, I forget who is is not Carpati, but it's one of I think he he retweeted it something on the lines of like you you, um, you know, LLMs let you outsource thinking, but not knowledge.

[00:06:47]>> Right.

[00:06:47]>> Right. And then like or experience, that kind of thing. And that's like I'm definitely feeling a bit of that in my day job right now. It's like, "Oh yeah, I don't necessarily know this as well as I should do. I can I'm very effective at what I'm doing, but if someone come Yeah. But no, you're so you Yeah, tell me more. Tell me more about this approach."

[00:07:01]>> [laughter] >> Well, yeah, and it it's a lot of this sort of comes from I it would be bold to call this a realization cuz I don't really know that it's fully true, but my suspicion is that it is going to be increasingly important for software engineers to read code >> Mhm.

[00:07:21]>> in the future.

[00:07:22]>> I think that's I mean, even as you get more senior, I think that's that's that's become true >> Yeah.

[00:07:27]>> as you end up mentoring more folks and they ask your opinion of code and whatnot. And you know, maybe you spend more time, yeah, either explicitly reviewing PRs or just over people's shoulders helping them. So yeah, I think reading code is >> Right.

[00:07:38]>> It's always been important. It's It's been very important. I think it's going to become even more important.

[00:07:44]>> Right.

[00:07:45]>> And I >> Until we teach the robots to to review it and then at what point will that flip and then it's like we're writing code and the robots are telling us not to do it that way.

[00:07:53]>> I mean, so the the code is always, I think at this point I think I could say that the code is always going to be the the actual source of truth, right? Like there's enough well-worn and you could certainly point out some situations in which source code and what the machine is actually doing do not line up.

[00:08:10]>> Right.

[00:08:11]>> in a consistent way. Like that is certainly possible.

[00:08:14]>> Yeah.

[00:08:15]>> But uh it is, I think, much less likely than the delta between what the code is doing and what the English that created the code in a prompt is doing, right?

[00:08:25]Like the code is just >> I think that's a fair assessment, yeah.

[00:08:28]>> Yeah. It's like it's like a a really good source of truth if you're going to pick a source of truth for like what is this program actually doing, right?

[00:08:35]>> Yeah.

[00:08:36]>> And so being able to read that is really important.

[00:08:38]>> It's funny actually, so somebody uh tweeted at me or whatever not tweet, but you know uh the the current whatever hackademy thing um with the the thing that like someone was saying, you know, like yeah, yeah, the LLMs will be to code as uh C is to assembly code. Nobody looks at the output of a compiler, hahaha. And of course >> [laughter] >> Yeah.

[00:08:58]>> at compiler explorer, you know, like everyone everybody you know, this the reason this exists is so that we can because we don't trust it and we do do this. So >> Yeah.

[00:09:07]>> that backs up your point. I think there's always need to look one layer below, right? We've talked about this before, the various layers of of things and like each abstraction or layer brings something to the party >> Mhm.

[00:09:18]>> and you learn to trust it in some different ways, but ultimately you need to be able to like look down and go, ah no, whatever. And yeah, for those folks who talk say, you know, we just give it English and we'll just get a binary out the end of it.

[00:09:30]It's like, no, the the kind of differentiability of the intermediate forms of say code is is is useful. I mean, we typically don't diff the binaries and go and get to get anything useful out of it, right? That doesn't seem useful, but the thing that generates the binary like the concepts from that make sense that I can look at something I've asked the AI to do and say is this a reasonable way of achieving what you did given what was working before and I trust.

[00:09:55]So, yeah, anyway.

[00:09:57]So, you've been Yeah, reading code is an important skill. There we are. I've just remembered where we're going with this.

[00:10:02]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, so I I it So, that this whole exercise is an experiment in what if I learned a programming language by reading it. Now, I think you and I have talked before about both of our brains really work best when we sort of get down into the nitty-gritty and like step-by-step build a thing. And it's like that's how we really really really understand something.

[00:10:25]And so, I am trying to push myself to grow the skill of being able to have like the ideally an equivalent level of understanding of code that I am just reading.

[00:10:39]And I'm trying to start that like you know, I may not get there, but just moving that direction. I'm I'm trying to start that by this experiment of like can I can I say that I am fluent in Rust having written basically no Rust?

[00:10:56]Right? Like can I achieve that? I don't know that I can, but that's what this journey is all about.

[00:11:02]>> I am very skeptical that you could do any more than you could read every book that says how to drive a car and then get in a or land a plane or you know, those kinds of things, right? They feel like things that you have to do a little bit to be able to do well. But then there may be humans that do this. I mean there are very bright people out there who learn and think in very different ways to the way that I do.

[00:11:23]>> Yeah.

[00:11:24]>> Um so, you know, I I remain skeptical, but I I think what you're doing is really interesting.

[00:11:32]Uh So, how's it going so far? I mean, you've been like how many days you've been only been doing this a couple days?

[00:11:36]>> 3 days. It's going really well. And I one thing is that uh, of course like Claude and I'm sure the LLM or Joyce would do this, is shockingly good at coming up with good pointed questions to test my understanding because it knows what my understanding is cuz it taught me all those things, right? Um so and and being able The other thing that has been really nice is being able to compare it to other languages kind of getting back to our earlier point about there's concepts that you bring in from other programming languages. I'm like, what would this look like in Python? How does this compare to Java? What would this look like in Ruby? You know, how does this compare to JavaScript? And like finding all those little things where you can cuz I feel like a lot of people learn this way where they're they map, right? They're mapping >> You so concepts from one thing to another. Like X but not Y.

[00:12:23]>> Right.

[00:12:24]Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

[00:12:26]Um, but so are you physically writing any of this? Are you purely reading it?

[00:12:30]You This is cuz I could imagine being a you know, like the best um, tutor where you're like it's grading you and asking you and saying and it's even setting you little challenges and saying, okay, now write something which command line parses and does blah blah blah blah.

[00:12:42]But you're not You've not written anything.

[00:12:44]>> I have not written everything. Now, I wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if Claude kind of invents a write me a function that does this kind of question. And I will just do that if it does that.

[00:12:57]But I am not prompting it to do that.

[00:13:00]Uh, and thus far everything has been basically like explain what's wrong with this code, right? Or explain why this works, right?

[00:13:10]And that's it's been very good. It's been very good.

[00:13:13]>> You know, you know, this the sycophancy of these things late leads me to think that maybe it would be a little bit forgiving >> [laughter] >> to you. You know, well done. Yes, you got it right. Oh, just this one minor thing. And you look it and you're like, "No, that's terribly important." Um you know >> It it it does it does say things like, "Well, you got it mostly right, but here's the thing that you missed." And it's like, "Oh, you got the concept right, but here this thing is wrong."

[00:13:37]Like it it I haven't been able to because I haven't developed enough of an understanding yet. And like again, the last time I wrote Rust was like 10 years ago. So at this point I basically have forgotten >> You've forgotten most of it. Yeah, you understand >> remember the basic structure of the language and it's >> Looks a bit like C with the types the opposite way around to normal and then something something borrow checker.

[00:13:57]There you go. Right, Rust.

[00:13:58]>> Like you know, there's no inheritance and you know, yeah, you lend and borrow and there's no garbage collector and there's no free, right? Um but like I haven't gotten deep enough into this to have found a situation where it failed to point out something that I had said that was wrong. Like in retrospect, I realized that something was wrong. Again, I'm 3 days into this, so it may be not surprising that I haven't hit that yet, but it's definitely something that I am concerned about. And also just on the obvious thing of like how do you know that the LLM is right?

[00:14:32]>> Okay.

[00:14:32]>> Like yeah, that's true. You know, that's like a base level skepticism that everyone should have with any kind of exercise like this. You're learning from you know, whatever LLM. How do you know it's not giving you bogus information?

[00:14:44]>> Yeah.

[00:14:44]>> One of the things that I I think is going to be unavoidable probably with this is I need some external validation of the concepts that I'm learning. And obviously the thing that I would reach for is well, I'll go write a freaking program and then you'll know.

[00:14:59]But I'm trying to like not do that if I don't have to do that, right? And I probably >> timely, but a uh website that some people refer after my my last name has got an MCP now. Um so you can just add the the the end point of your choice.

[00:15:17]>> Oh.

[00:15:17]>> I will use compiler explorer.com/mcp.

[00:15:21]And then all the languages and all the execution and everything are available to it. So you could tell your LLM I mean obviously it could also write the stupid thing locally and run your own local rust tool chain and all that good stuff.

[00:15:32]But for small snippets it might be useful to say hey I this will I can do this on the go. You can add it in like the uh the web version of your your favorite LLM tool if you're having just a regular chat with it and it can it can go off and do the needful things there.

[00:15:45]>> Yeah.

[00:15:46]>> an interesting journey in how do you how do you give LLMs what they need without overwhelming them with tokens kind of thing.

[00:15:53]>> Yeah.

[00:15:53]>> Which on my side but that's a whole other story. I don't want to derail totally but yeah.

[00:15:57]>> giving it too much context.

[00:15:59]>> Yeah.

[00:15:59]>> One of the more interesting elements of this is you know previously when I had been doing this you know learning a new language by building a project it was very much like okay I'm going to get my laptop and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to plug in the monitors and put on some music and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to code and that was like a very like focused >> Right.

[00:16:15]>> activity that was restricted in when and where I could do it right? Now I can do this on the train home. I just pull out my phone pull up the chat that I have running with Claude and be like okay what does this operator do here? Like what is this thing? And you just kind of keep it going >> It's very that for me has become very valuable the ability to essentially continue useful knowledge work while on the move >> Mhm.

[00:16:40]>> be it through remote control of a session that I've got running somewhere else be it through exactly as you describe I've got a number of long-lived projects that have me trying to understand >> [laughter] >> I'm laughing because it's so sad.

[00:16:55]Try to understand you know how 1980s television signals were encoded decoded.

[00:17:00]>> Yeah.

[00:17:01]>> Um for reasons we'll talk about hopefully on another podcast but um and that is very valuable and you can say yeah I've just been thinking about this thing like I'm walking the dog.

[00:17:10]What about that? How does that bit work?

[00:17:12]How do you know that this is true and then you can it's it's a useful thing and you know 10 years ago, 15 years ago, maybe even 20 years ago, you would just Google it, right? It would be a Google search, and you would find it. And then you'd be like, "Oh, this is cool." And you find someone's blog page that talks about that thing, and you scroll down until you find it. And then, you know, maybe maybe the 10 or 15 years ago, you start looking at the the synopsis thing that appears at the top of the this pre-AI like, "Hey, did you mean this thing?"

[00:17:38]And you're like, "Oh, I did. I find I've got the answer to it." Which obviously was it has its had its own bag of problems, you know, like, "Well, now Google aren't actually sending you to the web page that had the information on it." Which means that hit. Now, of course, you do get the AI summary at the top, which I think it's only I think I don't know you've if you perceived this or not, but the tide seems to have turned from we hate this to mostly indifference and occasional, "Oh, that was handy." Suddenly dinner dinner to rather dinner table conversations with with my family have gone from, "Well, this is stupid, hahaha." to, "Oh, it says this." And you're like, "Oh, hmm."

[00:18:14]Yeah, like for the that But yeah, all these things are really valuable ways of being on the move and being able to continue doing something.

[00:18:21]But, I wonder if that comes with a different problem of you know, burnout, right? We've talked about this before where you're managing 12 different chats and trying to make progress whatever. And now you can't get away from the stupid thing.

[00:18:34]Yeah.

[00:18:35]Sorry, that was a real derail, but yeah.

[00:18:37]>> No, it's not. I mean, it's all related to this, right? It's it's If this >> [sighs] >> I I was going to say, "If this works." And then it's like, "How would I know if it worked?"

[00:18:48]>> Yeah. Yeah, how do you test this, right?

[00:18:51]>> Well, yeah, kind of. I mean, it's sort of like, "Okay, I I I claim that I am fluent in a programming language. What do you use to back up that claim?"

[00:18:59]>> there is there a distinction between fluidity to read and fluidity to write, too? Do you cuz I mean, like, so fluidity to read to me means that you understand everything that's that you will likely see in the language.

[00:19:11]>> Yeah.

[00:19:12]>> And you are capable of then applying your sort of experience and your intelligence and your you know, I I guess experience, right?

[00:19:21]To say, I think this is a good way of doing this. This seems fine to me. There are no issues. There are no bugs. Tests are good. All that stuff, right? And that is still fundamentally different from given a blank page make a Rust project that does X.

[00:19:34]>> Yeah.

[00:19:35]>> That does seem like a different skill set.

[00:19:37]>> Certainly in the in in anytime in the past if someone had come to me and they had said, "Well, I am a, you know, C++ expert but in reading only."

[00:19:47]>> Yeah.

[00:19:47]>> I would have been like, "Ha, ha, oh wait, you're serious." Right? Right?

[00:19:50]Like like what?

[00:19:52]So, >> is it like, you know, like like a foreign language? To go back to our original language >> Yeah, like you can hear it but you can't speak it, something like that?

[00:20:00]>> Yeah, you know, like or you know, reading I could read a book in French, say, and you'd be like, "That's one thing, but if you drop me in Paris, I'd be oh, I'd be SOL, really." You know?

[00:20:08]>> And maybe it is just as simple as that.

[00:20:10]Is it they actually are just separate skills and you if you learn one, you'll get better at the other one incidentally, but you you actually do have to learn both skills.

[00:20:19]>> I So, the thing that I would wonder that you might miss, one might miss in a read-only uh training model like you're doing is, you know, those kinds of things where you've the 15th time you've done something you're like, "There must be a better way to do this."

[00:20:32]>> Mhm.

[00:20:33]>> And then you experiment yourself with different ways of doing it. Like, "Hey, can I use reflection to like, oh yeah, I can. Wait a second. I don't have to declare this stuff at all. I can pull it out of the structures." Or whatever like, you know, reflection's top of mind because of C++ has just gained it. So, I'm thinking of all the silly things you can do with it.

[00:20:49]But like, when do you have those galaxy brain moments of inspiration if you're just reading? It seems too passive to me for you to kind of go like, "I've read this 40 times. There must be a better way." And then be able to come up with that better way having only ever read code.

[00:21:04]>> And >> You know, I don't know if that I I don't know if I believe that. I'm just thinking out loud.

[00:21:11]>> Well, here's a thought experiment. So, let's say that I do this and then I do what I would normally do and I just sit down and I write a Rust program, right?

[00:21:20]How would you be able to tell the difference?

[00:21:23]Versus what I would have done before, right? Yeah. Like congratulations, you wrote something in Rust. That was your original plan for every other language that you've learned.

[00:21:31]>> Yeah, yeah. What would you >> What would be the difference? Like do I do it faster? Do I have like fewer questions?

[00:21:38]>> Yeah.

[00:21:39]>> Like the result would be the same, right?

[00:21:41]>> Yeah, that's a good point.

[00:21:43]>> you tell that the reading exercise actually made any difference at all?

[00:21:46]Like I maybe I could feel it.

[00:21:48]>> I mean I suppose, but if you if you did sit down and then you realized actually I can't write something. Then you would you can sort of like do the opposite.

[00:21:56]You can say like okay, yeah, I am proficient in reading and it would be a cluster to for me to actually sit down and write anything more complicated because you know, like I can't create something. I suppose it's you know, like it's a an say there's a reason why book authors are not also book critics in the same way that book critics, you know, there there is I'm sure there are a number of authors who can critique their own work and other people's work and whatever, but like there's a sort of like uh a creative process that's happening in the construction of something new >> Mhm.

[00:22:32]>> that perhaps it's hard to tickle when you're just reading. I'm not saying you couldn't, you know, like I certainly admit if someone sends me a PR and I look at them like no, no, no, no, there's a completely new way of doing this. Let me sketch it out for you. Then I'm I'm doing that that part.

[00:22:47]It's not like that doesn't happen, but like it's it seems like that the activation energy to start doing that is much higher than yeah, that seems okay to me. You just got the comments in the wrong place kind of feel, right? Yeah, and I don't know whether or not that >> This also seems just a little more almost like academic way to do this. Like you know, principled maybe, but maybe not with the right principles.

[00:23:11]>> [laughter] >> Where it's like, you know, no, first you should learn all of the operators and the keywords and how everything is structured and then and only then I mean it's like programming in the 1950s maybe worked like that. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up right now.

[00:23:23]>> learn where to put the holes in the in the punch card.

[00:23:26]>> Right. Like you're just like it's like this like unnecessary ordering of learning >> Right.

[00:23:32]>> that I wouldn't I have never done and wouldn't recommend, but I'm just kind of trying as a And it would be actually, you know, I think the more interesting outcome of this, the much more interesting outcome of this is that I do this and I do this for like 3 months and then I sit down and I'm like, okay, now I have something that I want to build in Rust and it's like this is just like if I had started clean slate. Like I I >> [laughter] >> None of the things that I have learned in the last 3 months have have like maybe I saved myself 3 days worth of work, right?

[00:24:05]Like that would be a really interesting outcome from this. So there really is there no substitute for just building stuff.

[00:24:11]>> I would yeah, this is it seems like reading is a valuable skill full stop and I think obviously your experience and your tastes and your sense about sensibilities are already putting you way way up in the like you know, the you're looking for certain patterns and you're like whether you express it with curly braces or indentation or lambdas that you apply or whatever it is.

[00:24:35]It [clears throat] doesn't matter. The syntax is the easy bit really.

[00:24:39]Right. So maybe you know, this is not necessarily a fair fight because maybe for you most of it is the syntax. And then after that you're like, yeah, sure, I need to do a visitor pattern here. I know how to spell that now in in Rust land or whatever. Or you know, you've seen enough code that shows you that there is >> [clears throat] >> some other way of doing it in Rust, that isn't the visitors or whatever, you know, like there in this or So, either way it's going to be an interesting experiment, and I think also the your instincts are right that the readability of a language, as in your your ability to be able to read, parse, critique uh code, understand code, um is by far will be more in more uh useful going forward.

[00:25:23]>> Mhm.

[00:25:24]>> And so, if you find it difficult to then write code, well, at least you can poke holes in your own work fairly easily.

[00:25:32]>> Yeah.

[00:25:32]>> Um I'd be interested how that comes along, yeah.

[00:25:36]>> One of the sort of the maybe the last point here, um is in addition to the language itself, I have also been asking it questions and uh prompting me to you know, prompting it to ask me questions, although this has not gone as well, about the ecosystem, cuz you know, Rust ecosystem is like legendary, right?

[00:25:56]And its consistency, you know, Cargo and all of that. But I was like, okay, um you know, it's like uh again, like a lot of this is really easy when you do comparisons. I'm like, what's the Is there a Rust equivalent to like the Java Flight Recorder, which would let me like see the state of all variables and memory and heap and look at all the threads and see what their stacks look like?

[00:26:16]>> Right.

[00:26:17]>> And they're like, no, it's like you can do like GDB integration and you can debug and stuff like that, but that's not really there.

[00:26:23]Um you know, I'm like, all right, what are the logging frameworks like? And it's like, oh, well, here's some options for logging and things like that. But I feel like there's a whole, you know, again, I feel like these days a lot of our podcasts are just recounting other podcasts, but surely at some point in the history of this podcast, I have uttered the phrase the difference between computer science and software engineering is computer science is solving problems with computers, and software engineering is solving the problems you create when solving problems with computers.

[00:26:50]>> [laughter] >> And the second derivative.

[00:26:51]>> Yes, exactly. Exactly right. And so the software engineering side of Rust and sort of like the blocking and tackling of how do I actually like run something and debug it and observe it and recover from crashes and do all of the other things that you have to do when you're when you're running software. Like that's a critical part and I think that's one of the things that you really get very well from writing a project.

[00:27:16]Like you get a you get kind of a little narrow slice. Like you don't necessarily get the broadest view from doing that, but like if you're like, "Oh, I built a thing and it does X and I went and I learned how to do it well, something that I'm happy with." Like that aspect of the software engineering of that language really like clicks and is super valuable. And so I am definitely not expecting to get any of that from just reading code. Um because a lot of it is like, "Okay, staring at the stack trace being like, what is wrong with this thing? How do I even begin to figure out what is wrong with this thing?"

[00:27:50]>> I heard though that that if you write in Rust, there's just no bugs. That's what I >> Oh, well maybe that'll >> [laughter] >> That's That was what the word is >> compiles then you can't possibly have any bugs.

[00:28:00]>> That's right. That's right. Sorry, I'm slightly more more snippy than it sounds. Just not [laughter] getting that that I mean it to be because you know, like this is it's just top of mind for like folks in the C++ community where you know, Rust is obviously quite obviously has a lot of benefits over vanilla C++.

[00:28:17]And you know, it keeps being tro- touted out. You know, like it's No, it is still possible to have logic errors in Rust, right? And >> You can just have the wrong understanding of the problem. That's no language is going to save you from that.

[00:28:27]>> Yeah, or an infinite loop. You know, again, that's you know, no one's going to stop you from writing an infinite loop.

[00:28:31]>> That's right.

[00:28:33]Fun side fact, did you know that snark was a portmanteau or is a portmanteau?

[00:28:38]>> No, what is snark?

[00:28:40]>> It is a portmanteau of snide remark.

[00:28:43]>> Get the heck out. I figured it was Lewis Carroll, you know, the hunting of the snark and then it came from that somehow. Although, I believe a the bunch of words came from the the um the nonsense poems that Lewis Carroll wrote, including Oh my gosh, I there was a list of them the other day, and I was like, "Oh, yeah. I Yeah, that makes sense."

[00:29:01]But, yeah. I mean, is [clears throat] is So, what two words is portmanteau made from?

[00:29:06]>> And you know, the the tragedy and missed opportunity is it's Why? Why would you not do that?

[00:29:14]>> I mean, I think it's uh it it's the the uh appendage on the foot of someone from Portman.

[00:29:23]That's >> We used to have this term uh AR redundancy. I I forget where that came from. It it it it was for things like PIN number and ATM machine.

[00:29:35]>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

[00:29:37]>> It It stands for acronym redundancy.

[00:29:39]>> Oh. Oh.

[00:29:40]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, that's uh that's definitely red right. I The thing is out of context, if you just say PIN, you might be saying you know, you might be uh referring to the short bit of metal that you you know, you hold things together with sometimes or but Anyway, it seems like we've reached the natural end of our experiment.

[00:29:59]>> in my Dear listener, I'm sorry for all the dings and bings and >> I know. I've just I just a bigger noise earlier was me throwing my phone as far away as I could because it kept making noises, and I and uh and also I apologize that my left Slack on, and so if any other dings have come through >> Mhm.

[00:30:15]>> And I don't I'm only apologizing really to our listener and me >> [laughter] >> in a few hours time when I edit this, but >> Yeah.

[00:30:22]>> Um cool. Well, this sounds like an interesting experiment. We're going to have to We should put a pin somewhere.

[00:30:28]Aha. And that's not a >> Right.

[00:30:30]>> the other kind of pin in in the calendar sometime to revisit this.

[00:30:34]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:35]>> And see how this worked out because this is an interesting way of learning. Um yeah, especially the thing on the train, you know, continuing to keep making good use of time. I mean, I use that what a brilliant thingamajig. I'm not sponsored, but you know, that's another thing that I'm doing to try and remind myself like enough of the maths that I need plural to help my children do whatever they need to do or that they've really surpassed me now. But yeah, but no, that's that's cool. All right, friend. Well, before I ramble anymore, I will bid you farewell and we'll chat some more another time.

[00:31:10]>> Until next time.

[00:31:13]You've been listening to Two's Complement, a programming podcast by Ben Rady and Matt Godbolt.

[00:31:18]Find the show transcripts and notes at www.twoscomplement.org. [music] Contact us on Mastodon. We are @[email protected].

[00:31:28]Our theme music is [music] by Inverse Phase. Find out more at inversephase.com.