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You're missing my point. I wasn't saying compilers aren't what I want. Indeed, I said I liked learning about them. I said that very few people build compilers any more, a big change from the 1970s when they found their place in the curriculum. No one parses anything anymore. The data formats like JSON were designed to piggyback on the built-in parsers. The same goes for theory. It's fun to learn but the reality is th…
How do you know when learning a piece of theoretical knowledge was useful or not in your day-to-day life? For me, it's all connected in a big web, and it's very difficult to find a piece of knowledge that wasn't applicable at some point. I feel like I'd be lying if I said my career were not helped by taking compiler theory, even though I never was hired to write a compiler. It's all part of my knowledge base that I b…
For those of us without infinite tape/time to simulate our undergraduate years, we have to make tough calls. You can call it a trade to try to elevate the science. You can imagine hypothetical futures when something become useful. You can suggest that it informs some other decision. Those are all fair rhetorical positions. I'm just saying that there's plenty of information in the modern curriculum that's just not useful to most people pursuing most careers.