Thank you for all the help!

[parkoo]

Hi everyone,

I just finished working through the second edition of The Elements of Computing. Wow, what a journey! The questions and answers on this forum from the last decade were an enormous help; I couldn't have done it without you, particularly Mark Armbrust/cadet1620, who is sorely missed. Thanks also to Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken for their incredible course.

For those curious, a bit about me: I'm self-taught and new to programming and computer science, but I've always been a computer enthusiast. Before working through this book, I worked through Kernighan and Ritchie's textbook The C Programming language. Therefore, I did the programming projects for nand2tetris in C. I learned a lot about C programming, but I spent most of my time chasing segmentation faults. Next time, I'd do it in Python.

There's still "more fun to go," as the book says. For example, my version of the OS runs but isn't nearly as quick as the version provided by the authors, and my compiler/translator/assembler suite needs a lot of polish. But if you had told me six months ago that I was going to complete this incredible project, I would have laughed in your face.

I think that finishing the book for the first time is just the beginning: there's so much more to learn and do with the Hack platform and beyond. I look forward to the continuing journey!

Thank you all,

Preston

[ivant]

Congratulations on completing this amazing project.

[Ichiro]

I finished all the projects except some OS classes in chapter 12. I would like to express my gratitude to this forum and the instructors who helped me solve problems regarding each project.

I started this project in 2018 when I was a master's student in environmental engineering. I had an interest in how computers work, which was the main reason why I bought this book. In addition, I wanted to work as a software engineer at that time and thought I could see if I had competence through this course. It turned out I did not have enough competence, but I acquired important knowledge and skills instead. By making the hardware and software on my own, I learned how computers work: how high-level language is compiled to machine language, CPU architecture and essential OS functions. Another important lesson was the method to detect bugs through trial and error. This skill helped me with my job when I had to write Python code to create sophisticated graphics or find out the system trouble as a sales engineer.

Without the support from WBahn, I could not have made such progress. Thank you very much.

Ichiro