Re: Why should students still study compilers?

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Subject	Re: Why should students still study compilers?
Date	Thu, 27 Aug 2026 07:48:20 -0400
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Michael Lehn <michael.lehn@uni-ulm.de> writes:

> But there have also always been students who wanted to know _why_  something
> works, either because they were curious from the beginning or because somebody
> managed to make them curious. They wanted to understand how one might come up
> with a proof rather than merely reproduce it. Those students gradually
> developed their own ways of thinking. Later they were not only better at
> dealing with known theorems and standard problems, but also at developing
> creative ideas when confronted with problems they had never seen before.

Which in my opinion is one of the advantage to use LLM. Having the
capability on your fingertips to dig deeper on the why, or even basic
more comprehensive explanation and the capability to expand my knowledge
very easily and the capability to compress the learning time.

> I have no idea which problems LLMs (which I use myself) will be able to solve
> better than I can in the future. But I suspect I will be able to use them much
> better if I understand which problems I can delegate to them as part of
> solving a larger problem that they cannot yet solve the way I can.

One amazing thing that I was able to do is to apply some formal
verification methodology to my day to day work because using LLM enable
me to explore and comprehend way more complex problem in a shorter time
and with less effort.

bix
[I suppose.  How do you know that the LLM got it right?  I'll say it did,
but that's not the same thing? -John]

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Why should students still study compilers? Michael Lehn <michael.lehn@uni-ulm.de> - 2026-08-25 08:46 +0200
  Re: Why should students still study compilers? bixbox <noreply@example.invalid> - 2026-08-27 07:48 -0400

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