I disagree here. Being able to use gdb makes things easier. I had 2 programming courses under my belt after taking a computer systems course.
People make it more difficult in their minds than it is. The key tricks being: one step at a time, use a debugger and google everyday assembly instruction that you encounter.
I’ll give you this: studying computer systems made me a better programmer.
Late reply, but gdb wouldn’t be used in nand2tetris. Their online grading system accepts only a couple of high level languages. I used Python to write the assembler and compilers.
What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that one would not want to be a raw beginner when starting nand2tetris. One would need to be thoroughly familiar with basic Python data structures. I used lists, dicts, and a class I wrote to handle the AST nodes.
I’d recommend nand2tetris before taking a full compiler course.
We’re agreed that low level understanding is very helpful. And, it’s interesting.
People make it more difficult in their minds than it is. The key tricks being: one step at a time, use a debugger and google everyday assembly instruction that you encounter.
I’ll give you this: studying computer systems made me a better programmer.