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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Ha, sweet memories.

I am 40 now; back in 2004-2006, for two years I was one of the youngest professors in Italy, teaching "compilers and programming languages".

I still feel so fortunate to have had that experience.

To help my students save the relatively huge amount of money to buy the dragon book(s), I created a condensed version of the parts that were required for the course - and I didn't charge anything for it, unlike what usually happens pretty much everywhere in Italy. They were available in PDF and OpenOffice formats, on the website that I created for the course (yes, the CS department didn't really have a proper website to use as CMS - I kid you not).

You can find the material here, it's in Italian but it might be fun to take a quick look: http://www.lulu.com/shop/simone-brunozzi/dispense-lab-lingua...

Such good memories.

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I was T.A. for COMP-520, Compiler Design, at McGill University for two years, and it was the best job I've ever had. The compiler project had not been updated in 10-12 years; my adviser trusted me to make a new, interesting project. I was paid by the department for 5 hours of work per week, but I poured in more than 35 per week to design, document, and implement a subset of Go

My hard work paid off immediately. Students were more interested by a language that was new, modern, and used in the industry than by the previous language that was used, Wig. As a result, enrollment jumped from 12-14 students to 45. Though it was a subset, and much of what makes Go interesting was removed (concurrency, interfaces, GC) it was still an extremely demanding project. Many times I thought that the project was too big, that we needed to cut back, but the students were real troopers and chugged through (by the way, when did 20-year olds become so smart?! I was never this bright when I was their age!) and all teams completed the project and made me very proud.

You can see the page for the first year of the class, along with relevant documents at http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~cs520/2015/

Do you have a link to download it without registering to lulu.com ?

Oh, sure, I just put the most relevant stuff (in PDF and SXW) in a single zip file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/medbtnjbd4lgoeb/lab-compilatori_br...

I did the same for Tanenbaum's operating systems book and for a post-secondary education course (around the same time and around the same age).

Fantastic! How was your experience overall? Did you do it in the US?

Greece. I learned a lot in the process having just an undergraduate degree at the time. The students didn't appreciate it much unfortunately (wasn't a university but a vocational school; don't ask why Tanenbaum was on the curriculum). Just one came to me after the exam (I had to pass them all anyway) and congratulated me of making it so hard for them (him).

There are two Aho Ullman books at my library, dense but amazing books.

ps: how did students do on this class ? too hard but loved ?

They did decently well. I wasn't too hard on the grades, but I wasn't easy either.

Do you have a public website for the course so I can see the problems ? :)

Ah, it was online until about 2007 or 2008. You might be able to find it with the wayback machine (it was something like www.wedoit.us/labcompilatori). I might have it in my old backups, I will check.

It is indeed archived, up until 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20080716040254/http://www.wedoit...

This is great Simone, thanks!

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