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Comment by tytso | Hacker News Reader

Well, back when I was an MIT undergraduate, one of the core CS classes handed us a breadboard and a bunch of 74XX TTL chips, and we needed to construct a general register and stack computer from that. (We did get some PC boards that gave us a ALU and a UART that plugged into the breadboard, as well as the ability to program an EPROM to implement the firmware, but none of this "here's an Arduino or Rasberry Pi".)

Maybe there's so much complexity in the software stack that we can't start CS majors starting from the hardware level any more, but I can't help thinking we've lost something as a result. These days, there are Java programmers who get that "deer in headlights" look when confronted with terms such as "cache line miss".

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> These days, there are Java programmers who get that "deer in headlights" look when confronted with terms such as "cache line miss".

Forget that, most of these folks can't reason about a program that doesn't have automatic garbage collection. Even if they have direct experience with C or similar, I have asked recent grads how they imagine reference counting or malloc/free works, and they very often start pulling out GC-influenced magical thinking about "the system" reclaiming things under the covers.

"deer in headlights"

lol, I see what you mean there. Now as long as the person you're talking to has a true engineering mind he/she will be happy to learn about the subject. But there's unfortunately also those that start looking you with eyes begging you to go stop the hardware mumbojumbo talk and go back to oftware only. I don't really consider them true engineers.

Which class was this, and are any of the notes or project assignments available online? That sounds like a fun project.

Sounds like http://www.nand2tetris.org/

It's 6.004, and it looks like they are still teaching it, which I was pleased to discover. Students are no longer asked to carry around the suitcase-sized breadboard "nerd kit" and they aren't using 74XX TTL chips any more. Now it's all done using simulators.

The name of the course is "Computation Structures", or, as MIT students would know it (since nearly everything at MIT is numbered, including buildings and departments), 6.004:

http://6004.mit.edu/

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