4 ms·

I think the advantage this has is you have one continuous path from NAND gate to Tetris. Whereas in my experience attempting CS at Cal Poly, we did all these st

I think the advantage this has is you have one continuous path from NAND gate to Tetris. Whereas in my experience attempting CS at Cal Poly, we did all these steps but they were disconnected. The output of one course was not used as input to the next. I don't know if there is any pedagogical benefit from being able to say "I built this whole thing from scratch". But it sure is cool.

alanctgardner2 13y ago
It's really hard to go from NAND to Tetris, because there's a logical jump when you get to VLSI. This is the whole notion of quantity being a qualitative property: when you get enough gates together, you really start abstracting them and thinking about higher-order components. There's no smooth zoom out, there's just a sudden discontinuity when you stop using individual gates and start using MUXes, flip-flops, etc as your primitives instead. I suspect there's another layer, but I'm not there yet ;) I think I may have benefited from going to a smaller school, in this respect: I've had the same professor for every core 'Computer Architecture' class I've taken across 3 years (apparently there's one other guy, but they teach the same content). The courses are numbered, and they pick up exactly where the last one left off. I think the problem with trying to fit this stuff into a CS program is that it's so broad and deep, and it's not your primary focus. For me all of those classes were tightly scheduled requirements, so I took them at the right time, back to back. It's definitely cool, and I encourage anyone who works primarily in software to check it out and get a better understanding of hardware design in an abstract way.
- Figs 13y ago
  I don't know what you mean about MUXes. It's just simple abstraction to say "yeah, take this pattern of gates and give it a symbol so we don't have to draw it over and over again in detail". You're still just wiring up combinational logic... Flip-flops and sequential logic made my brain flip-flop itself for a while though when I first ran into it. :) That really does require a different sort of thinking, since you're introducing time as a factor.
  - alanctgardner2 13y ago
    I know a lot of people who didn't really move beyond thinking about boolean logic. It's easy to reason about the larger scale component if you're reading a diagram, but it gets harder to design with them at scale.

alanctgardner2 13y ago

It's really hard to go from NAND to Tetris, because there's a logical jump when you get to VLSI. This is the whole notion of quantity being a qualitative property: when you get enough gates together, you really start abstracting them and thinking about higher-order components. There's no smooth zoom out, there's just a sudden discontinuity when you stop using individual gates and start using MUXes, flip-flops, etc as your primitives instead. I suspect there's another layer, but I'm not there yet ;) I think I may have benefited from going to a smaller school, in this respect: I've had the same professor for every core 'Computer Architecture' class I've taken across 3 years (apparently there's one other guy, but they teach the same content). The courses are numbered, and they pick up exactly where the last one left off. I think the problem with trying to fit this stuff into a CS program is that it's so broad and deep, and it's not your primary focus. For me all of those classes were tightly scheduled requirements, so I took them at the right time, back to back. It's definitely cool, and I encourage anyone who works primarily in software to check it out and get a better understanding of hardware design in an abstract way.

Figs 13y ago
I don't know what you mean about MUXes. It's just simple abstraction to say "yeah, take this pattern of gates and give it a symbol so we don't have to draw it over and over again in detail". You're still just wiring up combinational logic... Flip-flops and sequential logic made my brain flip-flop itself for a while though when I first ran into it. :) That really does require a different sort of thinking, since you're introducing time as a factor.
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  I know a lot of people who didn't really move beyond thinking about boolean logic. It's easy to reason about the larger scale component if you're reading a diagram, but it gets harder to design with them at scale.