He didn't say compilers were voodoo. Diagnosing subtle bugs in a complex code generator transformer is voodoo. If you haven't written the compiler, but are just

He didn't say compilers were voodoo. Diagnosing subtle bugs in a complex code generator transformer is voodoo. If you haven't written the compiler, but are just an end user, I'd say that's a fair assessment. It's a lot of work to identify what went wrong.