Porting Software as a Learning Hack – "Writing an Interpreter in Go" in Rust

As a self-taught dev I'm constantly trying to achieve two things:

1) Getting better at my tools or learning new ones 2) Make up for the theory I didn't learn in uni.

Usually, those two things are somewhat distinct. I'm either there using a textbook, grokking theory, or I'm getting the reps in at a new programming language or K8s or whatever.

I was wondering if there is a way to do both at the same time.

Of course there are trade offs, but I found porting software, interspersed with theory to be a great way to achieve that.

Naturally, you cover less theory than when you only do reading, and with the hand-holding you may learn less than when you use a tool you're good at to learn by trial and error.

But for me, following "Writing an Interpreter in Go" in Rust was a great way to learn more about Rust and about programming languages and Interpreters at the same time.

Did you try this or something else that helped you to maximise skill gain per unit time?

(I know this sounds like an engagement throwaway question at the end, but I'm genuinely curious!)

I’m doing the same but in Zig

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