[charles_f]

Interestingly, my engineering school adopted the opposite approach on practical teaching: the first couple of month after the preparatory years were all about re-building all the C stdlib, networking layer, then building your own shell, then building your own assembler and corresponding vm (it was an assembler for a quartet based system for whatever reason), then compiler for a random language in c++ (tiger) and so forth.

We also built a simple CPU from gates using an electronic simulator.

Left me with some confidence that I could do things with a relative confidence. Definitely value in learning the basics.

[copperx]

By random language do you mean probabilistic? That sounds pretty advanced, actually.

[charles_f]

No I mean teenager random, as in a language that no one ever heard about (tiger) which I believe is mostly there to learn about compilers