I too spent time crafting the perfect tool and sharpening the saw. I wish I had spent that time building things with existing tools, as I believe it was a form of procrastination.
What? Hasn't everyone who has done a CS degree implemented his own programming language as part of his course work? Just like everyone has written his own OS during university?
I am very confused. Why this big announcement? Why this bravado about doing something which isn't that hard.
Of course it is something very valuable to do. And you can definitely learn a lot doing it.
No!
1. Not everyone has a CS degree, including yours truly.
2. I chose not to attend University to do CS to pursue my curiosities/interest.
3. I am a Ghanaian and even if I had attended University I would not have done a programming language implementation or have written my own OS. The Universities in Ghana do not have that as part of their curriculums, although they do cover them at the surface level.
4. Because of #2 I was able to write a toy OS and now doing this Programming Language project.
Not everyone has a CS degree. Many developers get into the field by the old self-learning path that works very well to build Ruby on Rails websites, but falls short when they want to do anything more complex. Many keep building RoR CRUDs forever. Some people want to do more with what they have.
Sure and nothing wrong with that. Especially if you have no CS degree it is a valuable exercise.
But I just didn't understand the way the article frames it. It's not something "weird" to do, it is something which has been done by many, many people, usually for educational reasons.
Exactly, in my case I got into programming through interest and started teaching myself how to build web apps in python/django and continued pursuing my interest in learning a bunch of other interesting things.
"but falls short when they want to do anything more complex." yes right! and for situations like this doing hard projects goes a long way to make you a better engineer. You don't get to do them because you weren't taught in University or in bootcamps - How many bootcamps will even teach things like that?
Sadly even back in my day (and from a fairly decent uni in Australia) the (imo) classics like os, pl, graphics courses were neither mandatory nor "comprehensive" (ie they focussed on theory and large exams at the end instead a full featured project).
Even worse for Ghanaian Universities where I come from, You could boldly say 99% of CS/CE students never get to implement an operating system or programming language even though they spend 4 years doing CS/CE and you would be right.
At least, it was true in my case.