Relevant Compiler Design

 In this week's reading, professor Saumya Debray makes the case for teaching Compiler Design courses in a more general way, so that more students can relate to them and to make them more useful overall for a student's future career. Personally, I still don't fully grasp everything we'll learn throughout the course, but I do know that it is one of the most difficult (or maybe just time-consuming) courses of our degree. 

In general, I think we can all get behind the idea that making a class more relatable will make it easier for students to grasp and remember in the long term. However, I disagree with the notion that, at least for this class, making it more relatable makes it more interesting. At least for me, even without knowing what to expect, this has been one of the classes I've been looking forward to since I heard about it. In my case, I'm of the mentality that anything I learn is a new opportunity in the future. 

Having said that, I do think that Debray's examples made what we've seen so far in class a bit clearer, and having a higher-level example, such as the graph tool, will make it easier to keep track of more complex concepts by giving me a way to relate them to one another. 

Despite my opinion above, I do think this reading helped me realize that I might be using what I learn here sooner than I expected. I recently started working on Facebook's WhatsApp team, providing solutions for businesses to be able to expand into the platform, and I don't think it's too far-fetched to think that turning human language into code could be a solution to one of the problems. And although I don't have plans to actually design a compiler any time soon, it's never a bad thing to know how to do it, in case the opportunity ever presents itself.