[mikeurbach]

I can't comment on this specific course, but I took a compilers course from Tom Cormen that completely changed how I thought about computing. After several years in industry, it's not so much the specific techniques of constructing a compilers that remain useful, but the mode of thinking I learned.

I had an AHA moment along the lines of "Wow, the compiler writer is basically God." I had taken courses in software development and hardware architecture, but after writing a compiler I saw first-hand how a program--a description of a solution to a problem in a human readable language--is converted to the same description in a hardware readable language. The meaning of the program must be preserved by the compiler, but otherwise it has the freedom to generate any one of potentially many outputs that preserve the meaning.

There is a beauty I realized in the relationship between the programmer, the programming language, the compiler, and the hardware architecture. They are all in cahoots, but the compiler is the cornerstone. That relationship doesn't directly affect my decisions as a professional software engineer, but it forms the backdrop upon which I think about the act of programming and computing in general.