I've been really enjoying my Zig journey this past week. Not only because of Zig, but this idea of spending time on something and getting better is exciting. Maybe it's because when I was in school or university, I never really learned anything. Probably because I was under the impression that, learning requires certain level of intelligence and I don't posses it. Around the age of twenty six I started to have this yearning for learning something challenging. So, I picked the hardest thing I had known up to that point, that I had an interest in, programming. It was the second time I had tried to learn it, even then I had to start over three times, till it finally clicked for me. It was also the first time, I had put so much effort despite getting the feeling that I'm not really getting it. It's when I realized that, anything can be learned. Since, then my goal has been to experience mastery in programming.
The first time I had taught myself to program, I don't really know how I did it. I tried to re-create it when trying to learn Go, but it took me a while to get good at it too. Along, the way I had to unlearn a few things. So for Zig, I'm trying to do things that work and combine things that will stop me from having to unlearn bad habits. In essence learn Zig the right way. It's really simple, the things that work are writing a lot of code. Things like string manipulation, do somethings with files, arrays etc. I've decided to solve the advent of code questions for this. As for learning the language as it was designed, I'm just reading the language reference top to bottom, and looking for answers by other Zig devs in the forum. The language reference, is actually not bad. Previously, whenever I've tried to read a language reference it goes over my head. Maybe, I'm getting familiar with the underlying concepts of programming. Just maybe.
Any who, this is a lot of fun. I spend a couple of hours in the morning learning Zig. It gives me a sense that, I'm taking steps towards mastery, one day I'll find myself there. Hopefully, I get close but never actually get there, as I want to have something to do with my life. A challenge and a goal to pursue.
Happy learning. :)