Re:Rich Programmer Food (2007)
by mywittyname on Monday May 23, 2016 @02:14PM
(#11755697)
I believe you're missing the point of the article with this statement. Compilers contain basic patterns that are repeated everywhere in programming. So, to be ignorant of how compilers work is to be pretty ignorant about programming in general.
What I think Yegge was getting at is that having a comprehensive understanding of how compilers work will build a foundation for being a good programmer in general. The problems we solve everyday are fundamentally solved the smarter people that built the compilers we all use. His example was a problem involving text processing is more elegantly solved by someone with a knowledge of lexical parsing and ASTs than by someone who blindly throws regex at it.
Compilers are about effectively translating input into the desired program output. The "hardware" is just one type of structured output, but there are many instances where a programmer would output a structure that is entirely unrelated to a processor or machine code.
What I think Yegge was getting at is that having a comprehensive understanding of how compilers work will build a foundation for being a good programmer in general. The problems we solve everyday are fundamentally solved the smarter people that built the compilers we all use. His example was a problem involving text processing is more elegantly solved by someone with a knowledge of lexical parsing and ASTs than by someone who blindly throws regex at it.
Compilers are about effectively translating input into the desired program output. The "hardware" is just one type of structured output, but there are many instances where a programmer would output a structure that is entirely unrelated to a processor or machine code.