Author here, I wrote this post whilst thinking about how difficult I found it to wrote a Tetris (and failed) when I learned how to program. I hope to inspire novice programmers a little.
Years ago through HN I got introduced to Richard Buckland's course at UNSW on YouTube. It featured a microprocessor called the e-4917 which has always captivated me.
The reason is because I'm from a generation that learned programming in Java / Python and PHP. Which are higher languages that do not require knowledge about the way the "metal" works.
I've always been jealous of people who got to get their start in assembly, they seem to have a deeper understanding of the computer itself. Whereas I only barely understand the "higher" software parts of the computer.
So when I came across Buckland's videos's it was like this part of the computer was finally revealed to me. Seeing the CPU's interact with the memory taught me a valuable lesson:
That at the lowest level what is in a memory "cell" can be both an instructions to a program or the data used in a program.
I hope that with this post I can reach someone how used to be like me, and get them to a lower level.
PS: I also wrote a part two explaining how I programmed the emulator using React and TypeScript:
"The researchers can't say for sure that D.W. was directly controlling his pupils, but from their many tests, they did not find any evidence that he was using indirect strategies."
By reading this paragraph it states that they cannot know for sure. This makes the article's title very "clickbaity" to me.
This is very true, and what I mostly use lodash for these days. I also like the string utilities such as capitalize, and the utilities for dealing / getting random values.