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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
by dotBen 16y ago
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?
- dhume 16y agoThe post mentioned in the OP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129 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.