John Gough and Joel Pobar: Compilers, Compilers, Compilers...

Posted By: Charles | Apr 11th, 2007 @ 11:09 AM | 6,090 Views | 1 Comment
John Gough is a world famous writer of books and text books on Compilers - as well as being Professor xxx at Queensland University of Technology. He has been a part of the CLR and IL .NET project from a very early stage. One of his students, Joel Pobar, worked at Microsoft on parts of the dynamic parts of CLR/.NET added in version 2.0. Both of these esteemed gentlemen are in Brisbane, and Nick Hodge managed to interview them last week on compilers, functional and dynamic languages, history, learning, being geeks and the future of processors.
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#Apr 11th, 2007 @ 7:39 PM
Richard.Hein
Richard.Hein
... my guitar gently weeps ...
Great interview.  I am actually shocked to hear Joel say that the MS guys said not a lot of people were interested in compilers, if that's true, I'd like to interview some day (if I can make one myself first), because I figured it would be tough competition, like trying to join the elite game programmers out there.

John, I am one of those IT students who had to take Modula-2 during my first two introductory CS courses in university.  Oh My! Modula-2!  Perplexed 

I had already learned BASIC long before, and a bit of Turbo Pascal from my dad, but Modula-2 was my first "pointer language", and still to this day I just wish they had of used C++, no offense.  By that time I guess I was just longing for a language I could use "anywhere" ... imagine my feeling of foolishness now for taking a COBOL language course because they said 70% of business code was written in COBOL ... *shiver*.....

I remember that Modula-2 and Turbo Pascal were similar enough that my dad enjoyed helping me out, but I think the most advanced thing I ever did with Modula-2 was write a Tic-Tac-Toe game, as one of the exercises in the textbox suggested. 

I'm a language geek, but until I write my first compiler, what do I know ... Modula-2 wasn't bad, but the CLR ... is amazing. 

Cheers!
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