My video about compiler - and thoughts about how to study programming

[teo123]

Yesterday evening, I've published a video in which I try to explain the basic concepts of the compiler theory: https://youtu.be/Br6Zh3Rczig
What do you think about it?
Also, what do you think, does studying compiler theory help with programming in general? If you asked me this a year ago, I would say it certainly does. Now I am not so sure. I see that many people, most of which haven't studied the compiler theory, learn programming a lot faster than I do. I sometimes ask myself if it is because I've studied some compiler theory, rather than in spite of it. When trying to learn a programming language (such as MatLab or VHDL), I often find myself thinking "Wait, that seems impossible. How can that possibly be implemented in the compiler? I must have misunderstood something.", only to find that I didn't misunderstand it, and that the compiler somehow manages to compile that (even though I have no idea how I'd implement something like that in my compiler). Maybe I waste a lot of time on that and maybe I somehow need to turn off that kind of thinking in order to be a good programmer?
For example, I recently tried to learn some ReactJS and, of course, some advanced JavaScript. I thought it would be relatively easy, because I already knew some JavaScript, I've made a PacMan in JavaScript and a compiler for my language targeting x86 in JavaScript. But it wasn't easy for me. Soon after starting learning ReactJS, I bumped into something like this:

Code: Select all

const header=<h1>Hello world!</h1>;

I thought "Aha, that's some new syntax in JavaScript.". So I tried typing that into NodeJS, only to get a bunch of syntax errors. So I was thinking "What? If JavaScript engines can't parse the code when the ReactJS framework is not included, how can they possibly parse it when it is included? A framework can't possibly modify how the parser behaves, it starts executing only after the parsing phase has long passed. I don't get it.". Then came some importing CSS into JavaScript. I thought "What? How can that possibly work? JavaScript engines don't know anything about CSS. If you include a CSS file in JavaScript, it won't even tokenize (an identifier can't contain a '#' in JavaScript, but it can do so in CSS), yet alone parse and semantically analyze. I don't get it.". Then I saw the syntax for declaring properties of classes in JavaScript. In the example I saw, the declarations are separated with nothing but a new-line character. I thought: "What? But JavaScript is not a whitespace-sensitive language. How could this possibly work? How can the parser know where one declaration ends and where another declaration starts if they are not separated by a semicolon or a comma?". I thought it was too much for me, so I gave up.
So, maybe thinking about compiler theory is a very wrong way to think about the programming language you are studying. I was wondering what you thought about it.

[patekama120]

I agree that theory may not be the best way to learn when studying how to program. I think use cases and consistent repetition is good for learning!

[teo123]

I agree that theory may not be the best way to learn when studying how to program. I think use cases and consistent repetition is good for learning!

Some theory is obviously necessary for programming. But not nearly as much theory as is taught at the university (or even the kind of theory that is taught at the university). Maybe I worded the question wrongly. I wanted to ask if making compilers was a good thing to be done by a beginner programmer? Because I have not only studied compiler theory, I have also built two compilers for my programming language (one targeting x86 and another targeting WebAssembly). I was convinced doing that will make me a better programmer in general. Now I am not so sure. First of all, the skills needed to build a compiler obviously have little to do with the skills you need to build typical applications (most programmers have no idea how compilers work). Second, i seems to me programming tools now confuse me significantly more because I often can't help but wonder how they could possibly work, rather than simply accept they do work.