[mistagiggles]

I kind of agree with the article, I did the Edinburgh course on Compiling Techniques and I remember the first coursework being using antler and convert something like tinyc to AST (or at least a very small subset of c). Most of this was just fiddling around with the grammar file until the output seemed sensible. The second part was writing an AST -> jvm bytecode compiler. Going back to front may have been better, because we would have had more time for the 'hard' part (being during the quieter first half of the semester) as well as giving us a better understanding of how the AST should look, as we would have had to write/modify examples of the AST in order to get the backend working properly.