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Comment by qubax | Hacker News Reader

To learn what programming really is and how systems really work.

You can't really understand programming without having built a compiler. Or at the very least having done assembly programming. I don't think you can truly understand any basic programming concept like variable, pointer, reference, etc without learning compilers or assembly. Yes, a pointer "points" to something. But what does that really mean? When you realize that it's all just higher level concepts of specific assembly mechanisms of accessing data, you'll have a eureka moment. Don't see how you do that without digging into compilers/assembly.

And ultimately, it'll make you a better overall programmer since compilers/assembly is fundamental to every programming language.

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> You can't really understand programming without having built a compiler. Or at the very least having done assembly programming. I don't think you can truly understand any basic programming concept like variable, pointer, reference, etc without learning compilers or assembly.

This is just elitism with a little bit of "back in my day" thrown in.

I can assure you that I fully understood the concepts of pointers, variables, and references without knowing anything about assembly language or compilers. The concepts are not that difficult to grasp.

> This is just elitism with a little bit of "back in my day" thrown in.

That wasn't my intention and I apologize if it came off that way. Also, I'm not that old and I certainly didn't start programming with assembly. My programming experience began with OOPs ( Java, C#, C++ ). Didn't really touch assembly until I went to college. Also, compilers is a basic core course you have to take to get a CS degree. How is something everyone has to learn elitist?

> I can assure you that I fully understood the concepts of pointers, variables, and references without knowing anything about assembly language or compilers. The concepts are not that difficult to grasp.

The concepts were fairly difficult for me. Especially pointers. I thought I understood it but then later on realized I didn't. Maybe other people have their eureka moments sooner. For me it happened when I built a compiler and did some assembly programming.

I just think knowing how things work under the hood will make you are better programmer. Especially something like assembly since all programming languages gets translated to assembly whether you are using C# or Haskell or Lisp or ML. I wasn't trying to offend anyone. But I'm sorry if others were offended by my comment. That was not my intention.

> Also, compilers is a basic core course you have to take to get a CS degree.

I'm not sure if this is true. It wasn't required for my degree.

I wasn't offended by your comment, though. I just disagree with you. No hard feelings about that.

Anyways, I agree that knowing how things work under the hood will make you a better programmer. I just disagree with how you phrased that sentiment in your original comment.

For context, I agree with you that understanding compilers is very important to a deep understanding of the tools used by programmers. Knowing how languages are implemented sheds light into why certain design decisions are made and why certain language features behave the way they do.

That said...

> Also, compilers is a basic core course you have to take to get a CS degree. How is something everyone has to learn elitist?

Not everyone is lucky enough to get a CS degree.

Some people come from backgrounds where CS was not in their worldview growing up. Or they were discouraged from pursuing CS despite the subject being interesting to them. Or they tried taking CS, but they had to deal with external factors that prevented them from continuing.

To discount these individuals from making meaningful contributions to a programming endeavor is short-sighted. Their particular experience may allow them to be better at implementing the correct solution, even if they are not as strong of a programmer. Or they may be a very fast learner, and given more time and mentorship, they will learn about compilers, but they can be strong contributors until then.

Pointers deliberately hide these details from you by obscuring where things are actually located; presenting a unified memory model. To really understand what's going on you need to know how the stack is laid out, how structures work, and how functions are called.

Hmm , this is great. But to understand where variables are placed in the stack and how stack is managed your need to play with Assembly. Pointers are pointers but when you play with using Assembly then your know why some languages exposes only reference and lack pointer arithmetic. It sounds easy but it help you to build compilers or whatever.

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