Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler (Commentary)

Every standard isue language has already a myriad of compilers in store, which means there is virtually no reason to engage in the creation of new compilers for, say, C, or C++. Compiler design has become an art reserved for the overly ambitious of system and software developers (as well as Unix users), since it comprise a very reduced scope of Computer science that has little to no practicity in today's market.

Or at least, that 's what people would have you believe. 

Since I, as a student, may be naive and would not want to engage in what I consider a "fool's errand", I don't think I'll ever design a compiler (if it's not strictly for this course, of course) for money or as a personal project. I do appreciate some of the modules of the standard compilation process as interchangeable with other disciplines, as well as very useful for solving translation-related problems.

Linguistics is a subject I have always found interesting (fun fact: regular expression actually look like Polish language), which greatly adds value to the text analysis involved in the compilation process, at least for me. As a more practical approach, I have always wondered how Typescript, Coffescript and so many other languages work to produce code in their base language (Javascript, in both cases), or how markup languages can have so many different iterations depending on what the main language of the framework is. In other words, I cannot figure out how an .erb file can become an .html file.

Guess compiler science is not as specialized as I first thought, huh?