Re: Experienced People - Please share your struggles!

Posted by WBahn on
URL: http://nand2tetris-questions-and-answers-forum.52.s1.nabble.com/Experienced-People-Please-share-your-struggles-tp4034156p4034158.html

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.