My compilers class was a nightmare (and we used the Dragon book). I had hoped a compilers course would actually teach about the full process by which a text fi

My compilers class was a nightmare (and we used the Dragon book). I had hoped a compilers course would actually teach about the full process by which a text file becomes executable 1s and 0s. Instead it was a months-long torture of parsing text. Regex to NFA, NFA to regex, regex to DFA, NFA to DFA, DFA minimization, LL(1), LR(0), SLR(1), LR(1), LALR(1), along with memorizing all the rules governing which grammars are amenable to which parser, and working through all of the preceding by hand. And then finally about a week of teach-yourself-LLVM. I don't know if "compilers are a solved problem", but I'm pretty damned sure that the only people who need to know that much about text parsing know who they are, and would be able to reference it when needed. As an undergraduate course, it was utterly worthless.