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Question: I'm curious when you're learning something new such as assembler programming or how to make a mp3 decoder, how do you first grasp enough context to understand the manual/spec you're reading?
Asked by Will (23.125.224.x) on December 8 2024, 5:14pm
Reply on December 8 2024, 10:59pm:
    Those are pretty different questions but they both share the common thing, which would be to take a large scope of a problem and break them into smaller problems that you can manage. If learning assembly, writing C and then looking at what the compiler produces is a good way to get an idea of how a particular architecture works and what best practices are for it. Inline assembly is a nice way to do a little at a time and test that it works... As far as writing an mp3 decoder, sitting down with a spec pdf and writing a decoder is something I've never done, but taking a reference implementation and then throwing away and rewriting bits of it at a time, is a lot more straightforward. Writing Ship of Theseus style...

    this also extends to writing new software in general. The most difficult part is doing a ton of work that you can't test.
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