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Elitism about the term "compiler" aside, I've been reading through The History of the FORTRAN Programming Language and funnily enough compile in those historic
by eatonphil 5y ago
Elitism about the term "compiler" aside, I've been reading through The History of the FORTRAN Programming Language and funnily enough compile in those historic CS contexts just meant what "to compile" means in English: merging things together. It's an interesting read whatever the case.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52320048-abstracting-away-the-machine https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52320048-abstracting-awa...
- sfvisser 5y agoThis is not about elitism about terminology, but about sloppiness in using well established words in a specific context to mean something new. It happens rather frequently in the frontend world - which I’m sometimes a part of - and it’s incredibly confusing to all of us.
- eatonphil 5y agoI write frontend code and backend code and do compiler stuff for fun and I don't find it confusing. "Compiler" means completely separate things in so many contexts that I get the general picture and always need to look deeper to truly understand. Just because it's a generic term doesn't mean anyone should not be allowed to use it IMO.
- sfvisser 5y agoYou are right and I phrased my comment the wrong way. The confusing part is not calling this process compilation, the confusing part is now calling something a compiler for which the consensus previously was calling it a pre-processor. Now I started to wonder if there is something new that I wasn't aware off, like a browser support optimized binary style format that we can compile into.