TECHNICAL LUNCH

I'm on a 'technical lunch' - that's where one of the clever people deliver a talk about something clever. I rarely go.

In the office, they provide pizza as an incentive to migrate into the meeting room and listen to the latest coding practice. While we're all online though, we're logging in to a presentation - and so, 90% for company/connection, I'm currently tuned in to (and on mute with): "An Introduction to the Rust Programming Language"

I understand nothing. All the words are English, all the information is well presented, and I sort of get the flow, but honestly, this is way beyond me.

I often wonder why I didn't get deeper into coding. I did a little a bit at university with Monsieur Nogaret (I think that was his name) who started with digital bits and bytes and why memory expands in 2^n, and ended with an in-depth look at how to work out missile trajectories using Fortran 77. I tried to understand, but it was a tough gig. And Monsieur Nogaret was basically speaking French in every other sentence.

And it still is a tough gig, it seems. I know a little java script (if you equate it to a spoken language, I can probably order a beer or ask someone where the train station is) but anything deep and intense and I'm in a roomful of foreigners with little more than an inadequate phrasebook.

Listen in with me a moment:

"So... dangling pointers. Again this a fun one that happens in C++ but fundamentally we're talking stack and heap references here... if you didn't have the ampersand it would be returning 32 bit integer... there are distinctions between the primitive types and non-primitive types... the value 1 here is the value in the stack... as soon as we leave the scope, that value disappears..."

"An Introduction to Better Writing: Grammar 101" - maybe I'll suggest it for my own technical lunch and see how they like it! Although, they won't come along to it, will they? And I'm never courageous enough to tell extremely clever people how to do a thing they last learned in school. 

It's not for me, this - it might be the "most loved language on stack overflow" but I'm glad there are brilliant people out there managing the behind-the-scenes stuff with it. I think my lane might be different, as I possibly should have learned in 1998.

Thanks a lot, Monsieur Nogaret.