[Discussion] Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler

This are my impressions about the article Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler written by Saumya Debray, teacher of the department of Computer Science in the University of Arizona.

The article talks about, –as the title suggest compiler design but it focuses in giving examples of why and how students may use the knowledge of the field in other areas of interest. Obviously the author first describes the phases involved in compiling and what I liked most of this part is that he makes some references to actual use cases. The main example he mentions is about translation problems. I didn’t thought about seeing translation problems as part of a compiler, I mean using a compiler outside the context of programming languages.

Also I didn’t know that translation problems could be solved with a compiler view approach. I am particularly interested in scenarios like the ones mentioned in the lecture about translating regular sentences to a –for example SQL queries. This calls for my attention and I started to think if this is the way that AI applications (such as Siri) are built.

I believe in what the author says and it is that maybe we will never create a compiler but it doesn’t mean that such knowledge will be trowed away. In many cases, some of the techniques or algorithms we will learn, they will also be useful for applying in other problems.

Compiler Design is a course that we take in the last semester of the Computer Science career at Tecnológico de Monterrey. It sounds such an interesting topic so I wonder why it is placed as part of the final semester. I would preferred that it would be placed in the middle of our formation so we could use this knowledge in other courses and projects.

Honestly I am a bit scared about the difficulty of the course, but I like to be challenged and I know for sure this will be one of the best courses of my career.