I agree with you that parsing, for most people, or even most software engineering people, are much more useful then the other stages. Code generation is also in

I agree with you that parsing, for most people, or even most software engineering people, are much more useful then the other stages. Code generation is also interesting and could be useful too but that's pretty much the two of them. All the "interesting" stuffs people spoke about (e.g. optimization) actually has very few use cases unless you are working on it directly.