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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

My sophomore calculus Prof, whenever he'd introduce a new concept he'd say "ees treeveeal!" It was a such a trademark that the students would keep a log in their notes of every "ees treeveeal!". (Of course, the joke was none of it was trivial.)

One day, he remarked that this new concept "ees non-treeveeal". We knew we were in for it then!

My jet engine Prof would lay out the boundary conditions of a problem. Then, "Und now zat vee haff zee eekvayshuns, vee merely turn zee krank!"

What can I say. I enjoyed those classes very much.

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This gives me flashbacks to undergrad engineering courses. Nearly none of my professors, at a top 10 electrical engineering program, were able to explain things very well. Then you'd have to dive into poorly written textbooks to figure out what was going on. Kids these days have no idea how good things are with lots of youtube videos and online tutorials that give clear explanations for how things work. Even then, I noticed my old engineering program is still managing to fuck things up by doing things like using synthetic, poorly documented fictional microprocessors to teach assembly and computer architecture.

I have no idea why someone would want to teach with a fictional microprocessor.

[I'm well aware of who I am replying to here, I'm merely taking the bait and providing some hopefully fun links for people to dig into. :)]

Because that's how Professor Wirth ¹) does it ²), because it allows for some interesting educational side-treks ³), and because the difference between a fictional and real microprocessor is smaller than some might think ⁴).

¹) https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/index.html

²) https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/index....

³) "So what instruction would you add to this CPU to make the work we've been doing easier? Great, implement that instruction in the provided emulator."

⁴) https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/FPGA-relatedWork/index.html

(edit: And, of course, there's FPGA implementations of Professor Knuth's MMIX (http://mmix.cs.hm.edu/), too: https://github.com/tommythorn/fpgammix)

Yeah, well, I learned on a real 8 bit microprocessor (6800). It has about 40 instructions, all are simple. It's quite a dopamine hit to run your first program on an embedded system and see it working. It felt like being Master of the Universe!

(FPGAs did not appear for another decade.)

Khan Academy was my teacher

My maths teacher used to finish his proofs with QED - which he said stood for Quite Easily Done! My latin teacher was not so convinced...

I had a freshman year calc professor who also loved to label lots of concepts as “trivial.” It became a meme in my friend group. Unfortunately for my GPA, it was extremely nontrivial for me — I was only saved by a (nontrivial) amount of eleventh hour effort to absolutely smash the final.

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