I will never design a compiler...

For this week, we were assigned to read an interesting article written by Saumya Debray, where he tries to explain why it is important to still take compiler design courses for computer science students. Personally, for this almost four years in my major, I have explored a wide range of topics like programming, networking, software engineering, algorithms, maths, etc, and the field (for now) where I feel more excited is the one related to cloud computing. Probably because of my job and the things I do day by day, I think that maybe one person would put more efforts to certain courses because of the thought that it might be more helpful for his/her career. Maybe for compiler design (just maybe), I had the thought that even though the course seems interesting and relevant for computer science, I might consider other courses more relevant for myself for my professional growth.

After reading the article, I am not fully convinced of how compiler design will help me solve the problems I face at my job. But, there is still a chance of finding an application or a relation between compiler design and my career. Hopefully one day I may be able to identify a situation where my personal interests and ambitions are alligned. From the article, what I find interesting is that you can leverage tools like yacc and lex to build in an easier way applications like the one mentioned in the article consisting of an easy way for doctors to make queries (later turned into SQL queries). Anything that requires turning a set of inputs, applying rules and having an output (wow, more like an algorithm or a program haha), compiler design concepts and tools may be involved. In the end, let's see where this course takes me, excited to start programming in C#.

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