Playful Experience Review

[SephReed]

I just wanted to give a user review for the experience of Rustlings, as though it was a game.

Pretty fun overall, but I used AI a bunch. Many of the hints don't do much more than link to the docs, and the docs are effectivel the same as AI, but I can't specify what I want to know. Most of the time, I knew exactly what I wanted but I did not know the syntax. In the early game, you can find syntax hints in the error responses. That was great! But later, you can only find syntax in the docs. I tried reading the docs first so I could play the intended way, but I found that it was less fun and usually failed to answer my bigger questions around the syntactic sugar I was learning (collect injects the return type!? return types are back propagated for the sake of type casting!? Woah! Cool!). Most of my effort to keep this engaging had to do with only telling AI enough so that it wouldn't give me the full answer.

A couple things I think would be nice to change:

1. each chapter could have an syntax_hint.rs file containing all the syntax I will use that chapter. Sort of like a pre-answered quiz, it would give me a place to go scavenging for new syntax when I need it. And if I see no new syntax to solve my issue, then I'll know it's a problem of understanding and that I need to think more. At first I spent a lot of time thinking, because I trusted the course. But after a couple of the answers ended up being mysterious new syntax that I would have had to dig into the docs to find, I became less willing to think. It's very unfulfilling to spend time thinking, just to learn that the answer is extremely simple in terms of patterns/abstraction and the only complexity was obfuscation.
2. Having a emoji (eg ✅) with the TODOs would make them easier to find.

So, overall, the beginning is fun, but as it goes on you start to realize that this is meant to be a "read the docs first" type of learning experience, rather than a discovery one. Personally, I always skim docs looking for syntax that matches what I know I'm trying to do, so docs are just a crappier version of a syntax_hint system. Does anybody actually read docs? I feel like everyone just skims looking for syntax to mine.

[SephReed]

I was very happy when I got to the end, it checked all my files, and there wasn't an extra 6 to hit 100. For a moment I thought there would be, because I've been playing Silksong.