A crash course in compilers (2018)

A big drawback of R is that you can't embed it into a commercial application due to the GPL licensing (without releasing your source code). It's a fantastic language ecosystem though.

The bulk of this article is more about creating your own programming language to solve a particular problem or set of problems. Less about choosing between general purpose programming languages. Does your code often require the same boilerplate to get going? Do you have common tasks which are error-prone? There are syntactic or programming design reasons to use a particular language, or maybe the reason could be performance. Think of tensorflow for example, maybe it's familiar for some R programmers. Code written in a language designed for a particular purpose can be very elegant. I like [1] as an example.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble-pp/html.html

As someone who also just wrote toy compilers/interpreters:

I think it is a valuable thing to just dive into a subject that quite obviously interests you so much as long as you are humble about it.

At some point you change/tweak/break something. Then your humble instinct will say: "I bet this is a common problem, let me research it". And so you get deeper understanding of what you do in a fun and tangible way.

If that at some point means you get to read PLT about type theory and formal semantics, then so be it. But at this point you'll know much more about the 'why' and can assess/relativize the purpose, importance and relevance of a particular subject.

I think PLT is generally broad enough to include anything related to making (vs using) programming languages — the more practical topics like compiler/interpreter construction, VM implementation etc seem to obviously qualify despite not necessarily being very formal.

Concretely, you can definitely design and implement your own dynamically-typed scripting language without knowing anything about type systems or formal semantics.

Programming language design for humans is a completely different thing from PLT. It's more about usability, HCI, psychology. And if by success you mean popularity or any metric that includes productivity of the language, understanding of usability will definitely help you there, but knowledge of PLT will almost certainly hurt it, since it makes you think that a lot of PLT ideas are acceptable and usable.

Oh, goodness, yes. Remember: BASIC was successful!

It depends on your criteria for "success," of course, but creating languages has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my interaction with computers over my life, don't miss out!

Yes, it's possible. You'll reach diminishing returns in the language value much quicker without some background in types and semantics. But that point might come long after you achieved your goal. So, have at it and enjoy exploring.

> But does anything in this article really count as programming language theory?

It's a casual magazine - give it a break.

> I’ve been put off designing a programming language, even a dynamically-typed scripting language, because I’m just not that interested in PLT.

Many (most) successful languages were designed by people who either don't know anything about theory, or who do but don't chose to employ it. It doesn't seem to be a showstopper in practice.

Likewise; and it looks nicely put together. The article just skims the surface — classic magazine-style, I suppose — but I’m tempted to subscribe if it covers a wide range of software engineering topics.

If anyone here reads this regularly, is it worth it?

They were giving out issues of Increment freely in their recruiting events IIRC.

The idea of a software magazine is very cool. We need to go back to 70's era when magazines were extremely high quality (atleast the ones we remember - BYTE magazine, for e.g.).

I find the excessive design a bit offputting. It's beautiful, nevertheless.

Wonderful artwork and design in this article, and also in the linked articles and issues.

It's funded by Stripe. Probably the best way to support this work is by sharing it and upvoting it!

They're really good books specially if you want to program in a "modern" language but I personally couldn't stomach the code style nor the TDD focus. I'm probably being really unfair to the author, so please don't let this be a deterrent!

I personally enjoyed `Modern Compiler Implementation in ML` and Crenshaw's tutorial [0] There's also a Forth translation [1] if you're into that :)

[0] https://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/

[1] http://home.vianetworks.nl/users/mhx/crenshaw/tiny.html

A significant chunk of what the Dragon book covers is state machine theory, what you need to know if you're writing a compiler-compiler like yacc. The state of the art in code generation had moved on even for the edition I read in college back in 2004 or so, so the tail end of the book isn't super relevant. IMO it was never a good book for practical compiler implementation. It's better as an academic reference for compiler theory, especially DFA, NFA, PDA etc. construction.

Would highly recommend it if this sort of thing interests you.

I took cs143 at Stanford (so not the online version) and found it incredibly satisfying and enriching. Not only did I gain an understanding of well compilers, but programming languages, parsers, and real, applied uses of CS theory.

Theory and practice where too diverged, i.e. the lecturer didn't explain much about the practical part, you were on your own.