Rich Programmer Food

Pretty entertaining, if a bit melodramatic. I really wish people didn't mystify such a basic programming skill. Compiler hacking is something reserved for the wizards only if you take the classic definition of compiler implementation: an expensive engineering project, targeting a new processor, architecture or OS. In that sense, sure. You will be working in a lab with hundreds of developers, and tinkering with a piece of multimillion dollar prototype. In reality, however, "compiler construction" boils down to…

I'm a big Steve Yegge fan and I like most of his articles. I like this one too. But, some of them, like this one, leave me feeling a bit disheartened. Okay, compilers are important, I get it. I would love to learn more about how they work. But - I never got a CS degree and I'm 10 years into my career. I've learned a lot of valuable stuff but I'm not going to go back to school just…

This article resonated with me a lot. On Tuesday I wrote a custom build app for my games, something that'll take my game dir filled with crap, preprocess the source code to create multiple versions, filter out unnecessary files, auto generate an inno setup install script and spit out setup files (or run the game in auto play test mode, etc). Back in high school I wrote a similar thing in C#. I wrote custom code for every window and…

I don't know what to think of this post. I've definitely learned a whole hell of a lot from my compiler projects, but I don't see the point of turning compilers into a religion. I wouldn't go around telling people that they have to learn compilers to be a "real programmer", but it does seem like a pretty comprehensive litmus test: if you've written a compiler from scratch, it proves you really do understand something about algorithms, data structures, and…