(I've never written an optimizing compiler). I actually think many useful languages are mostly syntax. If you compile to another source language (like C or SQL

(I've never written an optimizing compiler). I actually think many useful languages are mostly syntax. If you compile to another source language (like C or SQL) you might not need much optimization. Parsing some syntaxes is difficult but that doesn't imply we should just ignore it and let libraries handle everything. Thinking about parsing is an opportunity to learn about tradeoffs and to develop a good taste designing syntaxes which are easy to parse (and, possibly correlated, manipulate) both for computers and humans.