To TL;DR the post, any time you transform a stream of symbols into another stream of symbols, it's compilation, and we do that all the time in computing, so if

To TL;DR the post, any time you transform a stream of symbols into another stream of symbols, it's compilation, and we do that all the time in computing, so if you don't understand how that process works, then you don't understand the fundamental systems of computing. Unix pipeline commands, for example. If you've ever used sed, it's apparently a compiler by his definition.