OP, don't excuse your work by prefixing it with your age. Your write-up is better than most people will ever do. Nice work!
I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
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Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#52Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
I don't support racism, sexism, ageism etc. Therefore I would prefer it if people didn't try to use those attributes to draw attention.
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#53Congrats on completing this guide. > There aren't many comprehensive systems resources if you aren't going to college, so I had to sift through tons of different sources of varying quality and sometimes conflicting information. The absolutely best resource you will find is Charles Petzold's Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software . The 2nd edition was just released. https://codehiddenlanguage.com/
Thank you! Looks hardware-y and very interesting, I may well read through it at some point.
Indeed. It starts from first principles, assuming the reader doesn't know anything about computers or even electronics. The final chapters are about coding.
Your guide could actually serve as an addendum to the book. Based on the title of your guide, I was expecting something more like Code, but now having read your guide, it's more of an introduction to operating systems with a particular focus on Linux and the CPU/memory aspects. Well done.
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#54What's your advice on how to teach programming to my kid? Curious to hear what another young person thinks. Kid is 11, has all the basics, knows how to type, knows how to open a terminal. What things did you think were important to learn, what kinds of things motivated you most? What did you do when you got stuck?
Not author, but I've always wanted to approach programming from an algorithms-first perspective with younger kids. Not called algorithms, of course. If they can create/combine algorithms to solve a problem... that's most of programming. I'd start with the "robot" problem: have them write a set of steps to complete a simple task, and then have them (or better, someone else) go through the steps precisely (no cheating…
Interesting! I've always been most interested in conveying information to people — human-computer interactions, interface and app design, educational writing like this article. Before I got into programming I was OBSESSED with this amazing circuit-building thing called Snap Circuits as a kid (highly recommend, definitely get a starter set for your kid if you haven't already), but even with that I just wanted to build fun systems — intercoms, doorbells, security systems, robots. From that I did more advanced electronics stuff with Arduino, and that's how I got introduced to real programming.
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#55Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
Mixed feelings, but overall, I think it does two things:
- promotes more civil discussion. Commentors are less mean, less dismissive, and when posting criticism it's usually more constructive
- gets the article more attention/traction than normal as a subset of the audience is impressed by the accomplishment/effort given the backstory
Which both benefit the author, and that's fine. We talk about hooks and marketing all the time here; this is harmless but effective, which IMO is the best kind.
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#56Wow, so because you're 17 we should click on this article? I was 17 also some time ago
Ah but did you make anything interesting when you were 17? Most people were 17 at some point, but most of them didn’t make anything particularly impressive at that age.
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#57Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
I just wanted to give another interpretation of the phasing used in the post. I took it more like this should be considered more impressive because it is well written AND written by someone so young. And i suppose it's fair to feel like that as the author cause its a pretty good post
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#58Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
Kind of a tangent off your point but you’re referencing the "girls do not exist on the internet" phrase like it was used by people to say don’t bring your identity onto an anonymous forum.
Was that how it was used? Back in my forum and chan days when that phrase was common I only saw it used to explicitly try to force women off the internet. It was usually quickly followed up with “tits or gtfo” for instance and I never saw an equivalent push on anyone mentioning they were a man
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
#59Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…
I haven't done the research, but I can't believe most of the information could be that hard to find or wrong, at least if you know where to look.
These sorts of topics are usually well-covered in the matching undergraduate-level computer science courses (computer architecture and operating systems, which, these days, are mostly optional since out of fashion).
Several universities have free courses available, and some of the professors in the field have also written books.
You'll also find pretty informative presentations in the relevant tech conferences if you'd rather stay closer to the state of the art.
Still, teaching is an art that is undervalued, and making the information more available or more fun to interact with is certainly very valuable.
Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs
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