I feel like there's a lot of value in the whole "knowing how the sausage is actually made" thing. You'll still take collections and the garbage collector for granted 95% of the time, like everyone else, but at least you will have some sense what's going on under the hood if you've had to implement pieces of it manually somewhere along the line— and an actual working implementation, not just a toy one for some undergrad class.
Having done no CS in school and jumping right into python and JS, learning how the sausage was made was immensely satisfying. I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator in Python and then a Game Boy emulator in Rust. None of those skills have been practically useful but were very educational.
>None of those skills have been practically useful
Honestly you never know when something you are familiar with becomes important later.
Something that was important to get it done may not be as important in later tasks. (My Operating Systems Class at university was greatly useful in my first job, not as much after) My dabbling in JS got me job programming timecard apps for blackberries and changed my work trajectory.
This field changes so fast and you can't learn everything, so learning things you enjoy and help you get what you are working on now.
That and data-structures and databases, you can never know enough about both.
Unrelated question: what resources did you use to write your CHIP-8 emulator? I've also been wanting to write one in Python for educational purposes, but haven't found any great resources yet in Python. Granted there are a few in C that I could try to translate over, but I'm curious to know what you used.
I looked at the Wikipedia page and a couple PDFs from Google front page.
I stole a collection of games from someone else's project to use for testing.
My goal was to get in the door so I picked a language I knew well and set some constraints:
1. Doesn't have to be fast. Just has to run.
2. Write opcodes as pure functions, passing in an array of memory and returning a new array of memory. This made it easy to test and debug. But also made it super slow.
3. DO NOT look at someone else's code. This forced me down a way slower path where I learned a whole lot more than I would have if I just reimplemented others' work.
Fully agreed. Currently doing web dev as a daily job, and even most of my personal projects are all fairly high-level. However, I cannot under-appreciate how useful and eye-opening building my own CPU pipeline and learning assembly was back in college. Just the fact of understanding how it ALL works under the hood (even if it is just a simplified version of it) made me feel amazing and gave me a lot of insights I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
