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**Gerhard Lazu:** Those are the good ones, just to be clear... \[laughs\] |
**Tim McNamara:** That's the world's reserve currency... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, exactly. They're like the strongest dollars, okay? \[laughter\] |
**Tim McNamara:** Look, we can pick our currency of choice. The thing that I think is significant is that the reason why this saves money is that essentially at the scale that AWS is, energy usage equals cost. And the reason it saves money is because it uses less energy to deliver the same -- in fact, a better user exp... |
And yeah, that's one of the things that really struck me... Because I came on to onboard with a very high degree of skepticism myself, but I've been really impressed actually by a couple of things. One is this customer centricity. Another one is a very strong dedication for data safety, and data privacy, and security b... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It detected the Gerhard threat. That's what happened. \[laughs\] |
**Tim McNamara:** And I think the cost savings are kind of just a byproduct of being a really -- how do I put this? Just a product I think of developing software in a way that actually meets the expectations that are being put on software developers. The systems that we write - I feel like this is a slightly philosophi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** For sure. |
**Tim McNamara:** We shouldn't expect that updates will be hard. Like, we shouldn't expect that the applications that we use will be flaky. Now, again, Rust is not a complete solution. And in fact, there are some things that I think that Rust makes really challenging. It makes life really difficult for learners. Rust i... |
\[46:06\] And the other the other area that it doesn't do very well on is I think in some of the data science, the scientific method, or the research methodology of being more exploratory, and kind of interacting with a dataset in an interactive fashion. I think Python is much better suited for that particular use case... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. How many years have you been doing Python for? Because you were a Python developer before. |
**Tim McNamara:** Right. In fact, I was quite into Python. I organized the New Zealand Python Conference in 2012. I feel a little bit this tinge of guilt and regret now that I'm seen as New Zealand's Rust guy... Probably 10 to 15 years; depends how you count, because I am a self-taught developer, and I spent a lot of t... |
Rust actually -- in fact, one of the reasons I learned Rust was because I wanted to make my Python go faster. But everyone sort of said to me, "Don't write C. That's for experts." |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. |
**Tim McNamara:** Like "Don't do native extensions. They're really difficult. You can blow up your application, you could cause a security vulnerability. You could create a segfault." I had very limited understanding about what a segfault might be. That sounded dangerous. And Rust actually taught me what a pointer was,... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That ChatGPT knows about as well, apparently... How did ChatGPT learn about your book, Tim? I mean, seriously... Did you teach it? Is that how -- |
**Tim McNamara:** I didn't go and like hack Open AI. ChatGPT knows about my book because it was announced in about 2017-2018. It wasn't released until 2021. It was the most horrific experience I think I've had trying to get that thing out. So to make things easy for myself, I started with this idea that technical liter... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Tim, I think I have to buy it now. \[laughter\] Alright, so for the listeners - we have this thing with Tim. It may not be obvious, like back and forth; it's like almost like jokes, but like we are pulling each other's leg... Figuratively, obviously, just to be clear. This was one of those... Bu... |
**Tim McNamara:** Ah, right. Okay. Well, I'm going to be in London next week. I don't know when the show is gonna \[unintelligible 00:49:38.21\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** There you go. Please bring the first edition, Tim. I will buy it, I promise. |
**Tim McNamara:** Okay. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Signed. Please. \[laughs\] And then I'll buy the second one, too. |
**Tim McNamara:** So that was the outset. Now, it turns out that it's really hard to write a technical book, especially between eight and eleven PM. Because I've just become a new father, and at that stage I didn't have a job that was in Rust. And I didn't want to read any of the other books, like the official book, be... |
\[50:26\] So my book distinguishes itself because it allows the reader to kind of work through biggish examples. So we write a database, we write a CPU emulator, we write an NTP client, we write a little kernel of an operating system. It turns out that when you are implementing these things from scratch, to write a cha... |
I remember there was one part in there where I was like -- we brought up the term segfault before... And I was like, "Oh, you know what I should do? I should write a thing that does what game cheats do." So a game cheat system will actually go and inspect the memory of another process that's running. Like, let's do tha... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. \[laughs\] Okay... |
**Tim McNamara:** And so I wrote this little utility, and it turns out that it could actually go and basically print you out all of what the memory address looks like. And you have to run into all these problems about like, "Well, this area of memory isn't actually being used, therefore you need to kind of decide what ... |
And then I needed to teach everyone about like virtual memory versus physical memory, and like how does a number get translated to like a physical place on the chip, and a bunch of other things like that. And that example actually needed to get like whittled down or chiseled away into just printing the memory layout fo... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** "That's another book, Tim. Tim, books shouldn't have books. Books have chapters. That's how it works, Tim." \[laughs\] |
**Tim McNamara:** That's right. So essentially, what I've done -- most tech books only have like one, what they call a capstone example. But mine has like at least a dozen. And that's a problem for the development of the book, because it slows everything down. |
So in terms of the readership, it's received very good results, but not universally positive feedback. So the people that complain -- so there's about, I'd say 90% it's either four or five stars. It's like, "This is a wonderful book." A good fraction of people have said like "This is the best book I've ever read." So I... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wasn't that intentional? That was intentional, right? It was by design. |
**Tim McNamara:** That was completely intentional that this was going to be a different book and teach you with a different learning style. I'm not going to go walk you through the entire language, and I'm not going to create a clone of the official free book. It's essentially redundant; there's no way that it's going ... |
\[54:15\] So for example, the CPU emulator - I only implement addition and subtraction. But we do know what an opcode is; we do know how to implement an opcode. But there's the rest of the spec for this little baby CPU, this thing called a \[unintelligible 00:54:27.23\] Anyway... So I'm rattling on... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How is the second edition coming along? |
**Tim McNamara:** I've just signed the contract, actually. I really wanted a break. I didn't enjoy the process of writing the first book at all. So the second edition, I'm going to clean up -- it's basically do what I think you're suggesting, or the reason you don't buy first editions is that there are things that I co... |
I'm going to expand my treatment of what a trait is, because I think this is a term that is odd. Programmers are used to terms like interface, or inheritance, or like an abstract base class potentially... But trait - that sounds a bit strange. And there are some other -isms, or some other quirks about Rust that I think... |
What I'm a little bit worried about is I will have less of a beginner's eye. So one of the things that I think worked really well was that I was primarily a Python programmer who was writing a book about learning Rust... Whereas now, I am probably considered an expert Rust programmer, and I'm a little bit concerned abo... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I can help. Beginner to Rust... You sold it well enough; I'm interested. You made me curious. I could help, and maybe others, too; others that you know want to get into Rust, to give you some feedback on the initial... Especially those that may have already read the first version; or they read the fir... |
**Tim McNamara:** No, this is really important. For anyone that's taking on a real writing project, it's really important to always have the kind of reader at the front of mind. I fall into this trap myself, but it's very easy to write so quickly, or that you miss a step, because you're presuming knowledge that your re... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Underscores... We keep coming back to those. You've created an underscore, right? |
**Tim McNamara:** That's right. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** "It doesn't matter what it is. Doesn't matter. It's okay, it's an underscore..." |
**Tim McNamara:** We have those too, in Rust, by the way. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So you are @timClicks on Twitter... |
**Tim McNamara:** Uh-huh. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What does Tim click? |
**Tim McNamara:** \[laughs\] So timClicks was originally a thing... So I was thinking of like a quirky, pithy handle, and I was clicking around on my keyboard. I was trying everything; it was relatively early in Twitter's life, so I thought I might be able to get a short handle. timClicks actually was just there becaus... |
\[57:38\] The things that that really click for me are an inherent -- I've kind of got this inherent idea that people are kind of growth-driven, or they are... I'm a real optimist for humanity, and we collectively are facing very significant problems, that are tractable. And this doesn't mean that I want to be overly p... |
And actually, we've known for centuries that two people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. I'm veering off-track here, but what I want to sort of say is that I've been really disappointed at how discourse is breaking down, especially I think in the anglosphere. In the English speaking worl... |
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