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Back in University, I had a Programming Languages professor who spent an entire lecture ranting about the term transpiler and how ridiculous he thought it was.
by vsnf 4y ago
Back in University, I had a Programming Languages professor who spent an entire lecture ranting about the term transpiler and how ridiculous he thought it was. Although I never shared his distaste for the term to the same degree, I anyways felt somewhat kindred with him on it. It's a useful term if you want to draw a distinction (for whatever reason), between moving from a human-readable language to a computer-readable one (compiling) vs moving from a human readable language to a different human readable one (transpiling), but I've never seen a reason to draw such a distinction.
- ethanwillis 4y agoWell technically you can read those computer-readable ones too. And even become somewhat proficient. It's just that it's "harder". And as a second trick, a computer can even "read" the human-readable languages as well :) I don't know if there's any actual good distinction to draw that won't have problems. I'd be interested to listen to people theorize on what the distinction is.