![]() The course was fun and hard and I learned loads. I’m a Good Programmer Software Engineer! I’m not just a JavaScript junkie who strings together APIs (jk <3 js) I want to know how things work From The Inside! I wanted to be free from the tyranny of ignorance of what the JVM is or does or what it means to transpile or cross-compile etc! Also Steve Yegge says that students who don’t take Compilers “run the risk of forever being on the programmer B-list” (this is also good reading if you’re debating whether or not to take Compilers it’s what convinced me!), and by golly, that was not going to happen to me. I wanted to learn how programming languages work, and how they’re created, and what a compiler does. ![]() But True Power comes from knowing the meta-language, and True Wielders of Awesome Power are language-writers like Richard Stallman, James Gosling and Grace Hopper people who invent programming languages, who give our imagination hammers and chisels, who define the way we create things, who give us the abstractions we need to build the things we do. Now, knowing how to use a language (or a spell!) makes you powerful. Programming languages, in particular, are reminiscent of wizardry ( to use a somewhat tired cliche). Once you understand how to use the symbols of a language, you can compose them in arbitrarily complex patterns to write arbitrarily complex things like a novel or a search engine. Languages (both the natural kind, like English (the rules of which you’re using to parse this sentence inside your head (unless you’re a bot, in which case 01101000 01101001 00100001)) as well as the programming kind like Java or C) are tools which people use to make Stuff. This winter, I took Compiler Design with Prof Laurie Hendren.Įver since I began programming, I’ve been interested in programming languages. Writing a compiler for a DSL in Haskell using Parsec
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