I have finally finished Nand2Tetris (via Coursera) - what an exponential (effort) ride!
My involvement with computers started in the early 80's with the VIC-20, then moving on to the Apple II and Apple Basic. I vaguely remember dabbling with Assembly at the time. My only formal computer science teaching was a class in high school and now Nand2Tetris. Other than these I am mostly self-taught (like many computer geeks?).
For the last 20 years I have mostly used VBA in Excel (a long story) and some SQL Server database stuff. For Part 1 of Nand2Tetris I stuck with VBA but then Coursera required submissions in Java or Python. So I had to learn one of these to complete the course.
I chose Python even though Jack is similar to Java, as I thought Python would have more applicability in the future.
For the Week 9 project I created a Wordle clone. My Jack program initially crashed the VM Emulator (too many lines) but eventually I got it working.
What I needed solve the problem moved from an an exercise in data compression and decompression to a light bulb moment with Jack code and compilation efficiency.
Since finishing the course I realised my project will never run in the CPU emulator (too many lines by an order of magnitude) so my interest is now in improving my VM translator efficiency using the many ideas on this forum. I will probably write up the whole story and post it somewhere.
"Only a ginger can call another ginger, ginger" - Tim Minchin
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