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kain_kusanagi on 09 August 2012
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Mnementh said:

kain_kusanagi said:

Would you tell someone who has yet to doodle to paint like Michelangelo? I'm impressed that were able to learn assembly at a young age, but you may have a natural talent for mathematics like Michelangelo had for art. Even if it didn't come easy to you having a natural talent makes learning a skill faster. Some people learn to read at 3 others struggle to read at 13. You are saying starting with assembly will work, but building a foundation to develop skills and knowledge is how most people learn. Not everybody can jump in the deep end and start swimming. Some people sink.

I don't believe I have a special talent to do that. As I said before, machines back then were simpler than they are today. They had 30-40 important commands, modern chips have hundreds. Also the older chips had a straightforward way to execute code, now they have things complicating stuff like out-of-order-execution and multiple cores. I also don't agree, that Python is per se simpler to learn. Python contains a big library of stuff, that has to be learned. I think simplest to learn are simple straightforawrd machines. You can start learning assembly as a game in a very simple and straightforward simulated machine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

You write assembly that isn't differing too much from real assembly.

I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. It's not a matter of how complexe the chip is. It's how to make it do anything usefull. The guy in this thread wants to build an 8-bit computer and then make games for it. That is not something anybody can just jump into it. He needs a background in computer engineering and programing. Even if he picks the most simple and most documented chips he will still need to learn the fundimentals of writing a game engine which is very complexe on any machine. It's not impossible, but it's a lot more involved than just getting the chip to print "Hello world".