I took an architecture class back in college and the first time we met, the professor gave us a couple of programs described in plain English. One of them was basically sorting, and the other one something else.
Each of us spent the rest of the semester picking an instruction set, designing a system, writing an emulator, and writing the code that would perform the tasks described on the first day.
I went a little overboard and created a C backend for the emulator along with an in-browser JS client that was pretty much a full-blown machine language IDE and debugger.
Needless to say, this feature creep didn't end well. I barely made it work well enough to get an ok grade but I learned that overconfidence can be more dangerous than the lack of.
> I went a little overboard and created a C backend for the emulator along with an in-browser JS client that was pretty much a full-blown machine language IDE and debugger.
Haha, this made me smile. I can totally relate to that ambitious line of thinking: given a task to solve, you imagined the logical next steps, to build an environment for solving that general class of tasks.
Great lesson about feature creep, but I also think that kind of vision and ambitious problem-solving can be valuable in the long term, if it works the whole community/ecosystem can benefit.
> I went a little overboard and created a C backend for the emulator along with an in-browser JS client that was pretty much a full-blown machine language IDE and debugger.
My original goal for the project was to type a letter on the keyboard and get something rendering on the screen, but I definitely felt the urge to keep implementing new things. Luckily the blog post took a lot of that urge away and focussed it on writing about the project!
Yeah, reminds me of the time I had to write a BSP tree builder as a course assignment, and ending up spending 2 months writing an OpenGL renderer + an importer for the Apple QuickDraw 3D API instead (hint: don't try to do that, it's almost a full object-oriented programming language in itself if you want to support even a moderately complex model).
All just because I found some nice architecture models that were only available in QD3D format, and I was convinced it would only take me a few hours to read them... I only got the brilliant idea of just converting them to something simpler like .3DS after I already finished the assignment >_<
Each of us spent the rest of the semester picking an instruction set, designing a system, writing an emulator, and writing the code that would perform the tasks described on the first day.
I went a little overboard and created a C backend for the emulator along with an in-browser JS client that was pretty much a full-blown machine language IDE and debugger.
Needless to say, this feature creep didn't end well. I barely made it work well enough to get an ok grade but I learned that overconfidence can be more dangerous than the lack of.
Here's what I was able to salvage from the front end on short notice: http://blago.dachev.com/~blago/CS-535/stage_2/src/web/ It's using ext.js which was pretty cool at the time.