The criticism seems well-founded, but at the same time, perfect is the enemy of good. If the book is entertaining, I think people should be allowed to learn through their mistakes if the alternative is not learning at all. We need more people who feel empowered to build interpreters and whatever they want without worrying too much about proper form.
My dad was a high school math teacher who became a COBOL programmer by accident in the early 1980s because a large local IT company put out an ad saying they’ll hire anyone with a college degree. A couple of years later, when I was eight, I was writing terrible BASIC programs and asked him if it’s possible to invent a new programming language. He showed me how to write an interpreter in BASIC for a custom language. It wasn’t useful for anything and it certainly had no LISP-like elegance, but it was a revelation to me that everything that happens on the computer was defined by people, and I can be one of those people even if I’m an eight-year-old in the middle of nowhere.
"""
it was a revelation to me that everything that happens on the computer was defined by people, and I can be one of those people even if I’m an eight-year-old in the middle of nowhere.
"""
My dad was a high school math teacher who became a COBOL programmer by accident in the early 1980s because a large local IT company put out an ad saying they’ll hire anyone with a college degree. A couple of years later, when I was eight, I was writing terrible BASIC programs and asked him if it’s possible to invent a new programming language. He showed me how to write an interpreter in BASIC for a custom language. It wasn’t useful for anything and it certainly had no LISP-like elegance, but it was a revelation to me that everything that happens on the computer was defined by people, and I can be one of those people even if I’m an eight-year-old in the middle of nowhere.