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Comment by gricjeh | Hacker News Reader

And then again still, the “best programmer” sacrificed code quality in pursuit of quickly producing features. The article doesn’t define code quality measures but I’d still take the lines of code metric as either not a measure of value in itself or with a massive grain of salt.

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That was the right tradeoff for the situation. I think any attempt to use this case study to draw conclusions about maintainability would be a mistake; that's just not what this is useful for.

Hi. I wrote the python implementation. I've had prior experience with compilers and I'm obviously biased but I would say it's quite readable. The main compiler part (without optional features or the LR(1) or lexer generator) is 2040 lines and contains very little magic. It would be easy to translate 1-1 to idiomatic C++ for instance - it would just be much more verbose. eval() is only used by the lexer generator. The metaprogramming could have been avoided by using dataclasses (but the marker used python 3.5).

(To be clear, the optional portions in which I implement SSA, various optimizations, a Hack-style allocator and some ad-hoc codegen is much less readable.)

Sounds really cool! As someone who programs a bit for work to help with automating processes and fun, but is not a computer scientist I'm a little jealous of never having taken a true database, compilers, PLT, or theory of computation course.

It sounds like you and your classmates are top notch and will go on to some pretty freaking cool careers (ex: I'd work at Jane Street if I was not a parent and a lot smarter :)). Out of curiosity, what are the typical places your classmates go upon graduation?

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