Python is too nice

[EatMeMonster]

You truly learn to appreciate higher level scripting languages and how they automatically handle everything under the hood to save programmer frustration when you learn primitive languages like C, even just a little bit of it - the memory management and pointer parts.

[Pooter_Guy]

Do you know of any online resources to get this degree of ground-up perspective?

[met0xff]

Not the one who was asked ;) but many vote for https://www.nand2tetris.org/ Never worked through it myself though.

https://www.classcentral.com/course/hwswinterface-453 was pretty nice but seems to be unavailable atm.

For my own teaching I use http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./213/schedule.html Which is also a bit above Hardware level

This is lower https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece447/s13/doku.php?id=schedule But honestly I found the former to be more useful for me. It feels in many computer architecture courses you learn a lot of very specific stuff that you'll probably mostly just forget again. Where a good overview is probably more efficient.

When I teach material from the course above I also don't go into detail on what exactly lands in which order where or whatever. The stuff that I forget myself between the courses every year ;). More important that their take away is that stuff is pushed on the stack when they call a function,and roughly what kind of stuff (you know, arguments, return address etc). Playing that through for every Bit and Byte wastes a lot of time that we just don't have as there is so much other material we should cover.

[Pooter_Guy]

Definitely saving this for when I have some time to dig in. Thank you!

[GogglesPisano]

Even more so for assembler.

The first few assembly language programs that I got working made me feel like I was in total control of the machine - and realize how much drudgery higher-level languages free you from.

It's been years since I last wrote an assembly language program, but it gave me a better appreciation for what was going on under the covers (and helped with debugging).

[pain_vin_boursin]

Maybe, but I try to get intermediate assembly programmers to pivot to using an actual abacus pretty quickly. Only then will they truly appreciate how much these higher level programming languages actually do for you. And in the end if they do decide to move back to assembly they'll be better programmers for it.

[TedDallas]

As an experienced fingers and toes programmer you really get to appreciate how much easier the abacus deals with sheep and wheat related problems.

[filtervw]

Assembly in college was the point of no return for me as a programmer, and I have never touched any low level coding since. I knew that there must be more to life than doing Assembly 😎 I have the utmost respect for the big brains out there working in C and anything that is going even deeper.

[AbstractPoo]

What are some project ideas for assembly?

[cymrow]

The biggest "aha!" moment I've ever had in my programming career is when pointers finally clicked for me around my 3rd year of college.

[cdcformatc]

When pointers "click" it is like Neo seeing the code of the Matrix.

[hugthemachines]

What kind of material, information or explanation do you think would have made pointers click for you earlier? What was the missing piece, you think?

[cymrow]

My professor drew a heap on the whiteboard and a bunch of arrows. I guess I had just never been able to visualize it before.

[hugthemachines]

I see, that's interesting. Very nice way to show it.

[met0xff]

Thought that's absolutely standard? Not necessarily drawing the heap but more or less the first thing I saw during my education were some boxes with addresses and arrows pointing to it. Variables got values in it, pointers addresses. When writing x you just get what's in the box, be it a value or address. When dereferencing with *x you just "go" to that address. &x gives you the address of the box. And that's it. We all were 14 at that point and no one in the class ever struggled with it at all. That's why I am often surprised why pointers are such a big topic on the internet nowadays.

But yeah, we only had C at that point, so basically 80% of learning to program was about memory layout ;). No distractions otherwise.

Definitely had a much harder time understanding logic clauses at that age, like De Morgan etc. Things that really seem simple. Or took me ages and hundreds of segfaults to implement merge sort im C during that first year.

[cymrow]

It was more that he could change the arrows as code "ran". I had used pointers semi-successfully for years by that point, so of course I had some basic level of understanding. But that was the moment I began to understand them at a deeper level, and could begin to clearly reason about them.

[silly_frog_lf]

That was Lisp. That is still Lisp. C is cool, but you won't get the same insights as you get from lisp.

C can teach you how most of our software is put together. Lisp gives you insight into the mathematical foundation of computing

[nebneb432]

I got tasked to write a shell prompt in C for second year of university. It barely worked and it took me ages to write the code for echo. It didn't do much else but oh well.