3 ms·

Has to do that. Implemented a 68000. It was a stupid project. I learned nothing from the project that I had not already learned along the way with simpler toy

Has to do that. Implemented a 68000. It was a stupid project. I learned nothing from the project that I had not already learned along the way with simpler toy instructional examples. And yeah, the double all-nighter and having one team member give up 12-hours before the due date was one of the worst experiences in my life.

dpe82 7y ago
If you'd already "learned it all" why did it require double all-nighters to complete the project while being so difficult a team member even gave up? Did they only give you 3 days to do it?
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  I can think of a bunch of reasons: - Things can be challenging without being educational. (OP explicitly says this) - ADHD - High course load / other assignments they might care more about. Your comment presumes knowledge of their situation that you don’t have. Don’t do that.
- cjensen 7y ago
  The 68K is a complex and full featured CPU, so there is a lot of tedious detail to be done that has nothing to do with the overall concept of "design a CPU". For example, there are so many instructions that it took a couple of days of time just to write the microcode. Let's use an analogy. Suppose you have a class where they teach using Minix. Tasks like "rewrite the time slice algorithm" or "implement part of a filesystem" can be valuable to understanding how an OS works. But if the final project is "reimplement the Linux kernel from scratch" well then you are going to spend a lot of time on the detail work of what you already understand without actually learning much new. It's a poor use of time. Or in compiler classes. Mess with a module in LLVM is a valid learning experience. Implement a tiny language is super valuable. But "write a C compiler conforming to the C Standard" gets you into a lot of gory details about C, takes an enormous amount of time, and teaches you very little about the theory and practice of compilers and languages.

dpe82 7y ago

If you'd already "learned it all" why did it require double all-nighters to complete the project while being so difficult a team member even gave up? Did they only give you 3 days to do it?

aoeusnth1 7y ago
I can think of a bunch of reasons: - Things can be challenging without being educational. (OP explicitly says this) - ADHD - High course load / other assignments they might care more about. Your comment presumes knowledge of their situation that you don’t have. Don’t do that.
cjensen 7y ago
The 68K is a complex and full featured CPU, so there is a lot of tedious detail to be done that has nothing to do with the overall concept of "design a CPU". For example, there are so many instructions that it took a couple of days of time just to write the microcode. Let's use an analogy. Suppose you have a class where they teach using Minix. Tasks like "rewrite the time slice algorithm" or "implement part of a filesystem" can be valuable to understanding how an OS works. But if the final project is "reimplement the Linux kernel from scratch" well then you are going to spend a lot of time on the detail work of what you already understand without actually learning much new. It's a poor use of time. Or in compiler classes. Mess with a module in LLVM is a valid learning experience. Implement a tiny language is super valuable. But "write a C compiler conforming to the C Standard" gets you into a lot of gory details about C, takes an enormous amount of time, and teaches you very little about the theory and practice of compilers and languages.