Joke aside, great work up! Thank you.

This article is a very good intro to compilers and now I understood how these things work. Thanks for the article.

It's great because of how accessible it makes compilers to average programmers, and, as a bonus, it also throws shade at the overly dense compiler textbooks:

"Classic compiler books read like fawning hagiographies of these heroes and their tools. The cover of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools literally has a dragon labeled “complexity of compiler design” being slain by a knight bearing a sword and shield branded “LALR parser generator” and “syntax directed translation”. They laid it on thick." (chapter 6)

Having read Compilers for a compilers course in college, Crafting Interpreters was a fun read on many levels.

There is either nothing to learn here, or a spectacular insight into compilation, depending on where you are in your career.

Compilers are fun. It’s an invaluable experience having written one. There is no magic left in a computer once you’ve written a compiler.

If you have written a compiler, this article is amusing. You get to see a programmers eyes open.

If you have not written a compiler, you get some insight about how they work- but perhaps you get more insight about how you work.

Also, the author should constant fold his arithmetic example. It slows down compile time, but makes the program faster.

It seems as if nobody seems to recommend this book, perhaps it just wasn't noticed before? Thanks for posting to hn.

Side note: the articles on compilation also seem to be good and simple to understand, especially the one about code generation (which is a topic that other articles somehow always skip)

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 foundational language theory, along with various tricks and techniques for translating a set of very straightforward algebriac rules, to another set. Anytime you write regexes or XPath to extract a set of fields from a documents and transform to something "readable", you're almost writing a simple one pass assembler, using some implicit "business rules" (i.e. all numbers should be floats, names capitalized, etc.) for productions.

Compiler skills will give you the theoretical backbone to discover, refine and assess those implicit rules. Not to mention techniques for transforming them from one form to another.

To the list of skills made mystical and magical by people I would add Lisp. It's not magic. I mention it because it just so happens to have compiler construction lore aplenty.

The first Lisp exercises you will read in your lisp book of choice (often requiring nothing more than basic English literacy and 6th grade arithmetic) are the expression simplification and evaluation exercises. Transforming your elementary school algebra rules (multiplication and division before addition and subtraction, etc.) to something the machine can execute. The hardest part is just understanding the words: if you have a hunch for what "expression", "term", "rule", "left/right hand-side" and "precedence" might mean, you're good to start.

Few chapters of a Lisp book will spare you volumes of traditional compiler construction techniques, taught by rote methods.

The first time I attempted to read SICP I had convulsions and physical pain. The whole time I had this inferiority complex nagging at me, telling me this was something for "smart kids" and I was unworthy. But this stopped after I went through the first few parts of chapter 1, and took in the playful tone the text. I felt stupid afterward; like being afraid of a St. Bernard. It looks big, but it's actually bubbly.

Don't listen to people when they say something is difficult or not for the faint of heart. Put a saddle on Falkor and go flying!