Stevey's Blog Rants: Rich Programmer Food

Stevey's Blog Rants

Random whining and stuff.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Rich Programmer Food

The Olive Garden: it's where poor people go to eat rich people food.<br>— Dave Yegge

This is another one of those blog topics I've been sitting on for way too long, trying to find a polite way of saying something fundamentally impolite. I don't see a way to do it. So: you stand a good chance of being offended by this blog entry. (Hey, just don't say I didn't warn ya.)

I've turned off blog comments, incidentally, because clever evil people have figured out how to beat captchas using non-algorithmic approaches, and I don't have the bandwidth to police spam myself. Sorry.

I don't want to give you a heart attack, so I'm going to give you the gentle-yet-insistent executive summary right up front. If you can make it through my executive summary without a significant increase in heart rate, then you're probably OK. Otherwise, you might consider drinking heavily before reading this, just like people did in the old movies when they needed their leg sawed off. That's what I'm doing, in any case (drinking, that is, not sawing my leg off).

Gentle, yet insistent executive summary: If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work.

You have to know you know, you know.

In fact, Compiler Construction is, in my own humble and probably embarrassingly wrong opinion, the second most important CS class you can take in an undergraduate computer science program.

Because every deep-dive I've attempted on this topic over the past year or so has failed utterly at convincing me after I sobered up, I'm going to stage this production as a, erm, stage production, with N glorious, er, parts, separated by intermissions. So without further ado...

Actually, that sounds like way too much work. So I'll just rant. That's what you paid good money to hear anyway, right? I promise to make so much fun of other people that when I make fun of you, you'll hardly notice.

Cots and Beards

I took compilers in school. Yup. Sure did. From Professor David Notkin at the University of Washington, circa late 1991 or thereabouts.

Guess what grade I got? I got a zero. As in, 0.0. That was my final grade, on my transcript. That's what happens at the University of Washington when you get an Incomplete and don't take the necessary corrective actions (which I've never figured out, by the way.) After some time elapses, it turns into a zero.

You can get an Incomplete in various different legitimate ways, including my way, which was to be an ill-considered beef-witted mooncalf who takes the course past the drop-date and then decides not to finish it because he doesn't feel like it. I earned that Incomplete, I tell you.

I took Compilers again a few years later. I was in college for a long time, because I got hired on as a full-time employee by Geoworks about a year before I graduated (among other reasons), and it wound up extending my graduation for several years.

Don't do that, by the way. It's really hard to finish when you're working full-time. Get your degree, then go to work. All the more so if you're a Ph.D. candidate within any reach of finishing. You don't want to be just another ABD for the rest of your life. Even if you're not sad, per se, we'll be sad for you.

I got a decent grade in Compilers the second time around. I actually understood compilers at a reasonably superficial level the first time, and not too badly the second time. What I failed to grasp for many more years, and I'm telling you this to save you that pain, is why compilers actually matter in the first place.

Here's what I thought when I took it back in 1991. See if it sounds familiar. I thought: a compiler is a tool that takes my program, after whining about it a lot, and turns it into computer-speak. If you want to write programs, then a compiler is just one of those things you need. You need a computer, a keyboard, an account maybe, a compiler, an editor, optionally a debugger, and you're good to go. You know how to Program. You're a Programmer. Now you just need to learn APIs and stuff.

Whenever I gave even a moment's thought to whether I needed to learn compilers, I'd think: I would need to know how compilers work in one of two scenarios. The first scenario is that I go work at Microsoft and somehow wind up in the Visual C++ group. Then I'd need to know how compilers work. The second scenario is that the urge suddenly comes upon me to grow a long beard and stop showering and make a pilgrimage to MIT where I beg Richard Stallman to let me live in a cot in some hallway and work on GCC with him like some sort of Jesuit vagabond.

Both scenarios seemed pretty unlikely to me at the time, although if push came to shove, a cot and beard didn't seem all that bad compared to working at Microsoft.

By the way, my brother Dave...