Experienced People - Please share your struggles!

[Slight_Of_Nand]

Well I finally got the PC counter working after about a week of struggling with it after work.

I almost gave up.  It was really, really confusing.

I'd like to hear if some of the masters of te craft have struggled in the past/currently?

Sometimes you feel so damn stupid when what you have done just doesnt worka dn you cannot see WHY it doesn't work.

Share your tales to inspire me and help me feel slightly less dumb.

Thanks,

NAND

[WBahn]

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but I learned C during my first semester as a grad student and I was working on an assignment (for an AI course I was taking the same semester, not the C class) and it was due the next day and I thought I was just finishing something up but my code started misbehaving badly. I sat in the chair in front of that computer for sixteen hours (no breaks of any kind -- my butt literally did not break contact with that chair) and I finally figured out that it was a simple memory allocation problem such that all of my game boards were overlapping in memory offset by four bytes because I was only allocating memory for a pointer and not for what it was pointing to.

I made a nearly identical problem sometime later (I think the next semester, perhaps) and it took me about an hour and a half to track it down. I've made that same mistake numerous times over the nearly three decades since and seldom take more than five minutes (usually far less than that) to find and fix it. So if I were to amortize that sixteen to eighteen hours of frustration over the number of times it has saved me time and frustration since then, I would have to conclude that it was quite possibly the most productive time I've spent in my entire career.

While not universally true, it is often the case that the most frustrating experiences are the ones that we learn the most useful things from -- and in part it's because of what made it so frustrating and that forced us to fight and struggle that turned it into an extremely valuable learning experience.

[Slight_Of_Nand]

Yeah - I an relate.  I only managed the PC because I painstakingly went through the compare screen and noticed my incrementor was never incrementing and I had to set the register "load" pin to be true always.

This one hing cost me about 4 evenings.  I figured that out tonight and the everything else fell into place pretty quickly!

So far PC has been the hardest part of the course.

Ah well Chapter 4 here we come!

[Lozminda]

Chapter 9. I might have bitten off more than I can chew, trying to write an infinite zoom mandlebrot set (esp with only black and white to work with)
It's keeping me out of mischief (and any kind of social life)

Lozminda

[Lozminda]

I might have got it to work, the VMEmulator is currently drawing a mandelbrot set. At the speed of the mid eighties, I'll let you know how it looks in a few hours time.

Can also print Pi to about 20 dp using this formula



using the same class that's letting me calculate points in the Mlbt set.

At term 20 (ish) we're looking at 20! / 41 (ish) !! which are some hefty numbers, so it takes a while.

To be honest it's a testament to the VMEmulator and the authors in general (Nisan & Schocken). I didn't think it (or me) would be able to handle it.

I'll publish, when I've found a good space to put up my code and once i get my code from working, to tidy code with readable comments.

So these challenges are possible given enough bloody mindedness; it's taken me 2.5 months, probably longer than project 9 should take, but it's just sooo much fun.
(I also probably need to get a life !

Lmda