Twist, or a lot of trial-and-error, happy accidents and incremental improvements. Reminds me in undergrad when architecting a MIC-1 microcode implementation:

Twist, or a lot of trial-and-error, happy accidents and incremental improvements. Reminds me in undergrad when architecting a MIC-1 microcode implementation: - I built a macro-instruction profiling emulator to Huffman encode the micro-instructions from all of the sample programs. - Every micro-instruction served several purposes (it was similar to VLIW but shorter). - I used progressive decoding to save micro-ops. Then, the resulting project was not only the shortest micro-code by far (37 micro-ops long) but significantly faster in terms of total micro-ops executed than the next submission. Note 0: I refuse to call myself a "hacker," it would be like referring to myself with a title like "king" or "lord" in the third-person. Note 1: I first learned to code without manuals per se or the internet, but sitting in front of the incredibly-complete and useable Turbo Pascal IDE and obsessively trial-and-error-ing. Then adding inline assembly, Borland C++, and so on.