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A comment on Ask HN: What if I missed the good stuff in my undergraduate education?.

Re:Ask HN: What if I missed the good stuff in my undergradua... by dotBen on Monday August 16, 2010 @06:10PM (#1609469)
Why do you want to lean compiler design (or any of the other topics you mention)? Are they directly related to your job/career path or just hypothetical areas of interest?

I have no college education and no formal CS training and I've done fine in the industry (12 year in it). I learned to program C at 13 from books and I learn what I need that is relevant from the internet and code samples. Stuff like compiler design which would purely be theoretical for me I don't let it bother me.

(I mean, at an abstract level I can work out how my code is converted into machine code/byte code but I couldn't write a paper on it).

Wouldn't it be worth spending the study time on learning the bleeding edge of development instead, like node.js or map-reduce if you are going to self-study?

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Re:Ask HN: What if I missed the good stuff in my undergradua... by dhume on Monday August 16, 2010 @10:27PM (#1610034)
The post mentioned in the OP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129) mentions some cases where knowledge about how compilers work would be useful and offers a warning about what may happen to those without this understanding:

"In fact I used to ask candidates, as a standard interview question, how they'd find phone numbers in a tree of HTML files, and many of them (up to 30%) chose to write 2500-line C++ programs as their answer."

Not that this necessarily describes you (since I don't even know what you work on), but I've heard it said (here, I think) that if CRUD is all you know, CRUD is all you'll ever do.

[ Parent | on HN ]