The blog below caught my attention on Hacker News and got me thinking about bottom up understanding of computing. This is about projects relating to some kind of demo/contest event for FPGA's (field programmable gate arrays), but the author goes into some detail about how entertaining "toys" like a VGA graphics generator can be made. That led to thinking about whether learning to work with FPGAs would help somebody to understand how computers "really work". But a little more thought made me ask myself whether a modern programmer even needs to know about, let alone understand machine language. Not clear that this is relevant. (but I'd love it if at least one CS course would show how decompiling a single C++ statement leveraging overloading, polymorphism, grotesque layers of header references, etc can result in an avalanche of machine code) Anyway, I haven't even finished this and I'm talked out of the supposition. :-) But perhaps some of you might be interested in playing with FPGAs, as the hobby level hardware is very cheap and tools and examples are plentiful.
https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html Pete
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