Why are compilers important to us students?

When I first heard of the Compiler class at school the notion I had was that it is like the last filter of our career, to see which people are capable of solving really complicated problems out there in the professional life. Now that I've learned what this class is about I think it is still a filter but the topics imparted are a little bit different from what I used to think.

The thing is Compilers courses are common in most modern Computer Science majors and, at the same time, it doesn't seem likely that student swill ever use it in their professional life unless they specifically get involved in certain areas. The paper shows us that there are many things compiler knowledge can help us with translation between different languages and many more things.

It is possible to generalize the traditional view and consider the problem of translating from a source laguage to a  target language, where both the source and target languages are defined broadly, not being necessarily programming languages. That includes many translation problems that we wouldn't think of compiler problems first.

In the end, students benefit from having a deeper understanding of a this topic because it makes them able to apply techniques and tools developed for compilers to other translation problems and able to produce better code more quickly. I for myself am very excited about this course and the challenges it may bring us, I love to face hard to solve problems and it seems that this is the right place to be for that matter.

I'l see you on the my entry for the Compilers course blog, meanwhile I'll be battling with school, work, being a Google Student Ambassador and having a personal life of my own, I just hope I don't die in the process XD

Introduction

Hi, my name is Víctor Amador, I study Computer Systems Engineering at Tec de Monterrey Campus Estado de México and I am currently in 8th semester. This blog is for the the Compilers class with professor Ariel Ortiz Ramirez.

I expect to learn a lot about this subject because I think this is one of the hardest in my entire career and if I get the concepts right I can use them a lot in the future for my personal projects and for work.

I've taken other classes with Porf. Ortiz and I must say I always enjoy them very much: he is a very intelligent person with great knowledge in his area and is also a good teacher; someone who always explains with clarity, who is fair and if you have a doubt he will advice you with patience until the issue gets solved.

I myself have never developed a school or personal project that has to do with this subject but I think it will be a major challenge for me since it’s a completely new area and language comprehension is a very interesting subject and I think I’d like to know more about how my IDE works or how my computer understands what I tell it to do when I program in different languages.

I hope I seize this chance to learn everything I can and be able to implement it with class projects and personal projects, as it is something that will help me comprehend a lot of stuff in my area for the rest of my career if I want to be a developer. Also, I am very interested in getting involved with the Google Developers Group in my area and share and receive knowledge with other experienced developers.

Sincerely yours, Víctor.

Have a great day ;)