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I dislike picking on people like this, but I feel like anything that might involve CS theory inevitably elicits this type of comment. I'm not sure what drives i

I dislike picking on people like this, but I feel like anything that might involve CS theory inevitably elicits this type of comment. I'm not sure what drives it, but I don't see how it helps, as it essentially amounts to, "don't write boneheaded code." I don't think many people would argue with that. I'm just not sure what it is contributing to this discussion. The number of people who know compilers well enough to know how to jam them somewhere inappropriate is probably...startingly low, too.

ModernMech 4y ago
> The number of people who know compilers well enough to know how to jam them somewhere inappropriate is probably...startingly low, too. Agreed, I had a number of students complain to me in my programming languages class that I was focusing too much on compilers, and who would ever really need to write a compiler except compiler writers? They would rather I had taught them Go or Python. But I had to tell them, guys, compilers are awesome. There are so many uses! You can use them everywhere! No one seems to want to :(
ElectricalUnion 4y ago
> The number of people who know compilers well enough to know how to jam them somewhere inappropriate is probably...startingly low, too. Nah, (almost) everyone that don't have a clue what they're doing does this for every app, be it required or not; it's however called "Babel" or "Webpack" because "compiler" is "scary".
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  The discussion is really not about people using compilers on their build systems.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    webpack is a very customizable compiler; my take is that once you're deep enough into --config (supposedly only required for non-trivial projects, in pratice, almost every JS project I saw requires extensive webpack mangling to work) you're building your own custom compiler with custom quirks for your project.

ModernMech 4y ago

> The number of people who know compilers well enough to know how to jam them somewhere inappropriate is probably...startingly low, too. Agreed, I had a number of students complain to me in my programming languages class that I was focusing too much on compilers, and who would ever really need to write a compiler except compiler writers? They would rather I had taught them Go or Python. But I had to tell them, guys, compilers are awesome. There are so many uses! You can use them everywhere! No one seems to want to :(

ElectricalUnion 4y ago

> The number of people who know compilers well enough to know how to jam them somewhere inappropriate is probably...startingly low, too. Nah, (almost) everyone that don't have a clue what they're doing does this for every app, be it required or not; it's however called "Babel" or "Webpack" because "compiler" is "scary".

marcosdumay 4y ago
The discussion is really not about people using compilers on their build systems.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  webpack is a very customizable compiler; my take is that once you're deep enough into --config (supposedly only required for non-trivial projects, in pratice, almost every JS project I saw requires extensive webpack mangling to work) you're building your own custom compiler with custom quirks for your project.