
Dragon book Critique – is this unfair? - rockybernstein
https://rockyramblings.quora.com/What-the-Dragon-book-didn%E2%80%99t-tell-us?share=1
======
PaulHoule
No.

It is an old book. It was a great book at the time but computing is a rapidly
changing field. A used copy of the first edition can be had at a reasonable
price.

It's hard to characterize the state of compilers in 2017. In the 1980s there
was real innovation in the commercial space with things like Turbo Pascal.
Then the market for cheap compilers got squeezed out by GCC, Microsoft, Intel,
etc. Apple got behind LLVM and made it viable. In the meantime a lot of
dynamism got behind Java, Python and other systems with more dynamic runtimes.

There are many exciting developments in compiler technology but they do seem
to me to be fragmentary and not yet put together into the makings of (say) a
great textbook or a framework which would put compiler technology into the
hands of many more people.

~~~
rockybernstein
By the way... the person who wrote Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, in fact
went to Microsoft and was the principle architect behind Microsoft's J++, C#,
probably the .NET runtime system. He is a lead architect there. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg)

One of the things that I _did_ notice in the 2nd edition is its preference to
cite GCC in references.

~~~
PaulHoule
Also the availability of open source has made a large improvement in courses
such as OS and compilers.

Back in 1990, students in an OS class might be doing pretty well if they
manage to get something that boots. Writing a compiler from scratch is also
pretty tough.

Today students can write device drivers for Linux as well as other modules,
also hack on open source compilers.

