The Place to Start for Operating System Developers
https://f.osdev.org/
Heh, I'm pretty sure that 95% of the people that I work with have Asperger's. They're all socially awkward, quirky, quiet, and can sit at a desk in front of a computer screen for 10+ hours a day.SeanMc wrote:I also have Asperger's Syndrome, this makes it so complicated. It's like I need an outline for everything to keep me on track.
Nah, most people don't like to communicate with others. That's why no one wants to be sales manager or something similar.Heh, I'm pretty sure that 95% of the people that I work with have Asperger's. They're all socially awkward, quirky, quiet, and can sit at a desk in front of a computer screen for 10+ hours a day.
This is a "bottom up" approach. It takes you for a really long trip of either old or dumbed-down languages before you arrive at a point where you can do things comfortably. I would advise against learning old / low-level stuff first, because there are a lot of things you have to learn and do in those environments that are simply no longer necessary in today's environments. What makes learning them positively harmful is that you usually still can do it that way in modern languages as well; you are just making things needlessly hard for yourself, and will have to unlearn a lot of the things you had to struggle through.In 2003, Schol-R-Lea wrote: If I were to suggest a specific curriculum, it would be:
- Start off learning HTML markup [...]
- Learn a language that can be run interactively [...]
- Go on to a simple compiled language [...]
- Learn some assembly language [...]
- Learn the basics of Perl scripting [...]
- Now dive into C, and learn it in depth [...]
- Go back and learn more Perl, or another scripting language like VBA [...]
- Last, tackle either C++ or Java, depending on what you mean to be doing with it. You can always go back and learn the other; you should by now have enough language experience under your belt that even a massive language like C++ should be easy to learn enough to work in.
Code: Select all
struct osdev {
const char *name;
unsigned long posts;
};
const char *get_name(const struct osdev *This)
{
return This->name;
}
unsigned long get_posts(const struct osdev *This)
{
return This->posts;
}
void increment_posts(struct osdev *This)
{
if (This->posts + 1)
This->posts++;
}
Code: Select all
_get_name:
mov eax, dword ptr [esp+4]
mov eax, dword ptr [eax]
ret
_get_posts:
mov eax, dword ptr [esp+4]
mov eax, dword ptr [eax+4]
ret
_increment_posts:
mov ecx, dword ptr [esp+4]
mov eax, dword ptr [ecx+4]
add eax, 1
jz .L1
mov dword ptr [ecx+4], eax
.L1: ret
Schools teaching Java / Python are basically feeding the industry needs -- rapidly educated Junior Developer manpower for Rapid Application Development needs. They're the conveyor belt of developer education, turning out tools (meant in a non-offensive way).Schol-R-LEA wrote:[...] most schools don't seem to teach anything other than Java or Python, now, anyway, so the argument for 'teach C++ first' is moot; no one learns either one of them as their first language these days, not in formal settings at least.
Which brings up one of the might-have-beens of the programming language world: what would have happened if there had been even one decent Modula-2 compiler for the PC that didn't cost $400+ (1985 US dollars) and some of the other things C had but Modula-2 didn't.nullplan wrote:Pascal also impressed the fundamental divide between interface and implementation into my mind, and that was very helpful for learning to deal with Java and C#. But Pascal always felt a bit like a toy. So then (ca. 2006) I got into Linux, and with that into C, given that most projects on that platform were and are written in C. And I immediately liked the way things were better defined in C than in Pascal (for example, in Pascal you have the type "integer" and not really an idea of what that is supposed to be, whereas in C you have "int", "long", and "uint32_t", and while all three might be (almost) the same type, each has a different definition for different use cases. And those were absent from Pascal. Just to name one example. Another would be how in Pascal it is impossible to create variadic functions, and yet the language itself provides four of them).
Just now I've read this take on p-code by Robert Nystrom of Game Programming Patterns fame (added here for completeness' sake):Schol-R-LEA wrote:...the use of p-code compilation rather than native code in most of the inexpensive compilers (absolutely deadly for a systems language of the time)...
RobertNystrom wrote:One of the first bytecode formats was p-code, developed for Niklaus Wirth’s Pascal language. You might think a PDP-11 running at 15MHz couldn’t afford the overhead of emulating a virtual machine. But back then, computers were in their Cambrian explosion and new architectures appeared every day. Keeping up with the latest chips was worth more than squeezing the maximum performance from each one. That’s why the “p” in “p-code” doesn’t stand for “Pascal”, but “portable”.
