[vector_spaces]

I'm a math dropout, now self-taught software engineer who has been spending the summer filling in gaps in my CS education. Programming language implementation finally started to click for me -- bytecode interpreters and compilers are much less intimidating for me than they were several months ago. And now having implemented my own (toy) interpreters, I'm interested for the first time in understanding some of the nitty gritty details of how hardware components work. So I started working through the nand2tetris projects and tinkering with breadboards, and wow. This stuff is so much fun! I'm bummed I didn't start sooner

I never really imagined I would be interested in this stuff, much less find it kind of beautiful. Pure math brain, if you aren't careful, can train you to view anything applied with disdain, and something as earthy as hardware even moreso. But it's kind of beautiful how there are deep and inevitable connections between some of the most abstract theory computer science has to offer (plt, pl design and implementation) and the way physical objects are harnessed for computation. I guess if you consider that von Neumann was a mathematician first and foremost then it starts to make more sense

Either way, I'm having a great time -- definitely recommend anyone in a similar position learn this stuff whenever you're ready for it

[yard2010]

Nand2tetris[0] is hands down the best course I took in my CS BSc, Nissan and Shocken did such a wonderful job making this great content accessible. It was a fun and rewarding experience in which I built a toy computer bottom-up from scratch.

[0] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

[Cogito]

And for an online interactive take on the same material, try NandGame[0]!

I've gone through both and they're both excellent. Nand2tetris requires a bit more set up, but goes deeper into things like language development.

For people who have previously looked at NandGame, there has been quite a bit of extra content added over the last year, well worth taking another look.

[0] https://nandgame.com/

[bvan]

Thanks for the link, just what I was looking for the other day. Was listening to a Steve Wozniak interview and his early tinkering with pong and the like.

[fhjkkkkk]

Cool! GZ to your found love in tech.

You are now a hacker:-)

Just in case you never heard about the CCC and hacker festival s: https://media.ccc.de/

A ton of great video recordings from tons of super cool hacker events are stored and there are also plugins to watch it on a smarttv

[aryamaan]

Share more about your journey. These days I am feeling to having an interest rising about such things. Picked Codes book one night and got really hooked up.